Alberta
IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, READ THIS! ALBERTA’S COVID-19 REPORT

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
By Barry Cooper
The report calls for emergency management experts – not doctors or health care bureaucrats – to be in charge when such disasters strike, with politicians who are accountable to the people making the key decisions. Most important, the report demands much stronger protection for the individual freedoms that panic-stricken governments and overbearing professional organizations so readily quashed.
Nobody needs reminding that the Covid-19 pandemic – and the official responses to it – left hardly a person, group or country unaffected. From the lost learning of school closures to the crushed businesses and ruined lives, to the recurring social separation, to the physical toll itself, the wreckage came to resemble recession, social disintegration, war and the ravages of disease all in one. Yet the governments and organizations that designed and oversaw the emergency’s “management” have proved decidedly incurious about delving into whether they actually did a good job of it: what went right, what went wrong, who was responsible for which concepts and policies, who told the truth and who didn’t, and what might be done better next time. Few countries are performing any such formal evaluation (the UK and Sweden being prominent exceptions).
In Canada, the Justin Trudeau government has rebuffed calls for a public inquiry (perhaps a small mercy, as it is hard to envision this prime minister not politicizing such an exercise). Nearly every Canadian province is also ignoring the matter. The sole exception is Alberta, which in January created the Public Health Emergencies Governance Review Panel to, as its terms of reference state, “review the legislation and governance practices typically used by the Government of Alberta during the management of public health emergencies and other emergencies to recommend changes which, in the view of the Panel, are necessary to improve the Government of Alberta’s response to future emergencies.” The Panel’s inquiry fulfilled a promise made by Premier Danielle Smith when she was running for the leadership of the United Conservative Party.
These terms of reference need to be understood because they greatly influenced what followed – both the restrictions on the Review Panel’s inquiries and the broad scope of its recommendations, released in a densely written Final Report (367 pages including appendices) on November 15. The Panel was chaired by Preston Manning, Leader of the Official Opposition in Ottawa some 25 years ago but who more recently became a prominent voice of skepticism regarding the pandemic response, particularly the dismissive treatment of Canadians’ rights and liberties. With this report Manning has driven and led not one but two major pandemic-related reviews, as he was also central in the non-governmental National Citizens Inquiry on Canada’s Response to the Pandemic, which heard wrenching personal testimony.
Despite working under limitations, Manning and his colleagues have rendered valuable and, indeed, unparalleled public services with each effort. Here one must note whom Manning requested for Alberta’s Review Panel. They are in alphabetical order: Martha Fulford, an academic pediatrician at McMaster University with numerous scholarly articles to her credit; Michel Kelly-Gagnon, a businessman and President Emeritus of the Montreal Economic Institute; John C. Major, a former Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada; Jack Mintz, arguably Canada’s most distinguished living economist; and Rob Tanguay, a Calgary-based clinical psychiatrist specializing in treating addiction, depression and pain. Additional specialists prepared several of the report’s 11 appendices.
This is important because the response of Alberta’s NDP and its left-wing media helpers has been to accuse the Panel of mongering conspiracy theories and attempting to legitimize quack pseudo-science. They are using Manning, the founder and longtime leader of the Reform Party of Canada, as a convenient whipping boy. But they are effectively calling the entire panel – including a former member of the nation’s highest court who stood out for his calm and measured approach – a bunch of nutters if not worse. These critics seem to have emitted not one positive thought about any aspect of the Panel Report. That tells you a great deal about them, including that they probably didn’t even read it.
The report also prompted some balanced to favourable coverage, including from several journalists who previously were pro-lockdown, pro-masking and/or pro-vaccine. Edmonton Sun columnist Lorne Gunter, for example, termed the report “sensible and moderate,” noting that it calls for following “all of the credible science.” Gunter’s use of “all” is significant for, he notes, “a lot of what was pitched to the public as definitive scientific knowledge, such as the vitalness of mask and vaccine mandates, school closures, event cancellations and lockdowns was questioned by solid, reputable scientists (not just streetcorner anti-vaxxers and ‘I did my own research’ social-media experts).” Calgary Herald columnist Don Braid, a habitual UCP critic, also sounded impressed.
Alberta had a thoroughly designed, tested and previously deployed emergency plan. It just chose not to use it against Covid-19. This bizarre and gravely damaging decision has still not been explained.
So what is actually in the report? Chapter 1’s review of the Panel’s purpose notes it was set up to review the procedures Alberta has to respond to “any public emergency, including a public health emergency,” and how its preparations could be improved, including by broadening and deepening “the role of science in coping with future emergencies.” Its purpose was not to criticize Alberta’s actual responses to the Covid-19 event. While the Covid-19 public health emergency was the initial reason the panel was established, its recommendations would apply more broadly. And while science should be considered central to good public policy, science should not be regarded as consisting of a single narrative. Accordingly, “alternative perspectives” (Report, p. 5) should also be considered.
Alberta Emergency Management Agency
The spring 2020 spectacle of wildly shifting statements from public health officials and political leaders, its blizzard of decrees and edicts, proliferating “mandates,” haphazard changes of direction, imposition of seemingly arbitrary rules, public chaos, and sheer aura of panic – sweat-drenched faces, bulging eyes – might lead any citizen to believe that governments had never planned for or faced an emergency. The promiscuous use of “unprecedented” to describe Covid-19 only added to this feeling. In fact, Alberta had a thoroughly designed, tested and previously deployed emergency plan. It just chose not to use it against Covid-19. This bizarre and gravely damaging decision has still not been explained.
The Final Report’s largely overlooked Chapter 2 discusses improvements to the Alberta Emergency Management Agency (AEMA), making it important on several levels. The Panel recommends AEMA be adequately funded and remain the lead agency in dealing with any future emergency, including any future medical emergency. This alone is huge and hugely welcome. To ensure that individuals who are capable of dealing with emergencies and not just apprehended medical crises are in fact in charge, the Panel recommends several legislative changes to the Emergency Management Act and Public Health Act. Even better.
This sound recommendation rests upon the distinction between emergency management and normal policy decisions made by bureaucrats. The original Alberta emergency plan was developed in 2005 to deal with an anticipated influenza pandemic, and was in turn based on planning initiated across North America following the 9/11 terror atrocity. Alberta’s plan was similar to the approach followed by Sweden in 2020, which despite widespread initial condemnation proved highly successful. Its essential feature was that it was written and was to be implemented by individuals who specialize in emergencies, not by individuals with alleged expertise in the specific attributes of an anticipated emergency such as influenza or Covid-19, what the Panel on page 25 refers to as “subject-matter experts” (a more extensive quote is below).
By way of analogy, societies well-prepared to deal with emergencies do not put a limnologist in charge of an emergency response when riverbanks are unexpectedly breached and cause catastrophic flooding. Nor do they scramble to place a vulcanologist in charge when a volcano erupts and threatens lives and livelihoods. The purpose of putting highly trained emergency professionals in the lead during difficult situations is to remove as much as possible the shock effect from the surprises that emergencies typically bring, especially to normal politicians and conventional bureaucrats who expect normalcy to last forever and who panic when it doesn’t.
The emergency plan Alberta had going into 2020 was designed by David Redman, a former senior Canadian Forces officer whose 27 years of service included combat experience, a vocation that typically deals with unexpected surprises. The problem as the pandemic began was not in any lacunae that the Alberta emergency plan may have contained. Rather, as Redman, who at the time was director of Community Programs for Emergency Management (i.e., coordinating local responses), told C2C Journal in an interview in late 2020, “Governments took every plan they had ever written and threw them all out the window. No one followed the process. [The politicians] panicked, put the doctors in charge, and hid for three months.”
Redman was also emphatic on the question of fear, which is inevitably transmitted by panicked officials. He spent countless hours during the pandemic trying to warn every Canadian premier and many federal politicians that discarding emergency management principles and giving healthcare bureaucrats unprecedented authority was dangerous and would likely lead to disaster. Specifically, he urged healthcare officials and politicians to avoid expressing fear. Instead, he sadly noted in an interview with the Western Standard last week, “They used fear as a weapon. In emergency management you never use fear. You use confidence. You show confidence that the emergency can be handled and present a plan to show how this will be achieved.”
The Government of Alberta made a catastrophic and, as said, never-explained mistake when it turned the province over to a narrowly focused, unimaginative career bureaucrat credentialed only with an M.D. To be fair, this was probably too much for any one person, and Chief Medical Officer of Health Deena Hinshaw was placed in a near-impossible position. The consequences of this decision led to the removal of Premier Jason Kenney, and it is also why nearly the first thing his successor did was fire Hinshaw. That is also why the Manning Panel was commissioned.
So let us agree that the Panel’s recommendations to strengthen AEMA would improve emergency management the next time it is needed. That said, the Panel ignored the fact (or at least declined to state) that, had existing procedures been followed in 2020, things would have turned out much better.
Making Proper Use of Science – and Avoiding the Dictatorship of “Experts”
Chapter 3 deals with the place of “science” in public policy. It was self-evident to the Panel that science could help fashion sound public policy responses but could also be used for “political expedience and ideology.” Here the Panel was half-right. On the one hand it advanced a notion of “the scientific method” that dominated science classes a couple of generations ago. According to this account, a researcher develops testable hypotheses that can be modified in light of experimental results. Such was the philosophy of science that I was taught in grade 7 physics.
Its great defect is that it takes no account of what we now call conflicting paradigms or of what German Enlightenment-era philosopher Immanuel Kant called the power of judgment. A pandemic, for example, is not a “fact” but the product of somebody’s judgement. On the other hand, the Panel showed great clarity in asserting that “science is open to the consideration and investigation of alternative hypotheses…and is subject to some degree of uncertainty as an ever-present characteristic of scientific deliberations.” (Report, p. 24)
Before considering how it elaborated the problems of conflicting and alternative hypotheses and of uncertainty, one should note how opponents to both the Panel and UCP government responded to its commonsensical observations. According to NDP Leader Rachel Notley, they were “incredibly irresponsible.” Indeed, she asserted, “What you see is an invitation to normalize conspiracy theories and pseudo-science at the expense of evidence-based medical care.” Notley and CTV went on to attack Premier Smith for embracing “fringe views” – including those found in the October 2020 Great Barrington Declaration, a document written by three of the world’s most respected epidemiologists and subsequently endorsed by, at last count, 939,000 fellow scientists.
One of the Panel-endorsed “fringe views” was that “the number one priority” when a pandemic event is declared should be “protection of the most vulnerable,” (Report, p. 25) which is to say not everybody. Should a particular pandemic’s impact subsequently spread to other social, political and economic relationships, this priority may be modified and adjusted. That sounds eminently responsible, but the NDP wants everybody locked down right from the start.
Still the real question is: who would order the adjustments? The Panel’s answer is forthright, much to the consternation of scientific “experts”: “That a clear and conscious decision be made by elected officials as to the scope of the scientific advice to be sought and that this decision not be left entirely to the subject-matter agency, given that it may have a narrower perspective than that actually required.” (Report, p. 25, emphasis added) As Manning later said: “Political people have to be responsible for the overall direction and management because they’re the people that the public can hold accountable.”
Manning’s determination to avoid having a democracy become a dictatorship of “experts” also reflects a critical aspect of pandemic response: that there are issues far beyond medicine in play, and that the associated decisions are not scientific ones. Weighing risks, for example, is an exercise in logic (a branch of philosophy) and judgment, which depends on inductive reasoning. Assessing costs and benefits of various possible actions is economic in nature. And then, deciding just how much risk to take on and what costs to bear in the pursuit of benefits are questions of ethics. Such things should be undertaken by politicians because, if the people as a whole have a different view of such matters, they can vote in a different government (or, as happened in Alberta, select a decidedly different leader from the same party).
To the experts and their spokespersons, this was an anathema. Lorian Hardcastle, an associate professor in the University of Calgary’s law school and medical school, warned: “We would see ideologically driven response to a public health emergency” that would make it difficult “to keep people alive.” We can characterize the Hardcastle position, which was endorsed strongly during the pandemic by legacy media, the NDP, the “expert” class and the health care bureaucracy, as the “orthodox” doctrine. A health care emergency must be left to the so-called health care experts. Everyone else (including presidents, prime ministers and premiers) should defer to their expertise and do as they are told. The public “conversation” is entirely one-way.
In reality, however, public health does not involve just a single disease but all aspects of the health of a population. Thus, focussing on illness stemming from the SARS-CoV-2 virus was not enough even for so-called specialists because such a focus meant that, for instance, cancer screening was postponed so hospitals would be empty enough to accept the (incorrectly) projected tsunami of Covid-19 patients. Yet cancer is also part of public health, as was the collateral damage from the economic and social effects of lockdowns, school closures and social distancing, none of which the orthodox doctrine considers. Skeptics pointed out all of this throughout the pandemic – and were shouted down as granny-killers.
Alberta
As President Trump creates new economy, Trudeau government ‘pandering’ to globalists

Jordan Peterson in a February 5, 2025 video titled ‘Canada Must Offer Alberta More Than Trump Could’
From LifeSiteNews
“Enough idiot green moralizing, enough carbon tax. Enough bloody net-zero,” he said, adding, “how about this: enough multiculturalism and destruction of the Canadian identity.”
Well-known Canadian psychologist Dr. Jordan Peterson had choice words for Canadian politicians last week, accusing them of “pandering” to elites and ruining the nation.
In the February 5 video entirely dedicated to the topic of Canadian politics, Peterson said that he is sick of “pathetic celebrity wannabe” politicians, a category in which he includes Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who are “pandering” to the global elites at the expense of ordinary citizens.
Peterson, who is from Alberta, in particular defended his province from a continued push by the Liberal government to undermine its oil and gas industry, amidst a trade tariff dispute with the United States.
“Enough overt and covert attempts to destroy the basis of the economy of my fair and hard-working province,” said Peterson.
“Enough delaying critical infrastructure development and rejection of international trade offers for natural gas, oil, and coal. Enough treatment of the resource economy upon which Quebec in particular, so unacceptably depends as a moral pariah.”
Peterson also took issue with Trudeau’s unpopular carbon tax and the Liberal government’s ongoing promotion of DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) ideology.
“Enough idiot green moralizing, enough carbon tax. Enough bloody net-zero,” he said, adding, “how about this: enough multiculturalism and destruction of the Canadian identity.”
In recent weeks, the Trudeau government has been embroiled in a trade dispute with U.S. President Donald Trump, the latter threatening to impose a 25 percent tariff on all Canadian goods if border security and fentanyl trafficking is not taken more seriously.
Canada was given a 30-day reprieve from the 25 percent tariffs by Trump after Trudeau promised to increase border security and crack down on fentanyl making its way south.
A similar reprieve was struck by Mexico, whose president, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, announced that after talking with Trump the same tariff threat will be delayed for another month.
Since taking office in 2015, the Trudeau government has continued to push a radical environmental agenda like the agendas being pushed by the World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset” and the United Nations’ “Sustainable Development Goals.”
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has been a fierce opponent of Trudeau’s green energy agenda and an advocate for the oil and gas industry.
Canada has the third largest oil reserves in the world, with most of it being in Alberta. Unlike in other nations, Alberta’s industry is largely considered ethical.
This is not the first time Peterson has accused Trudeau and his government of working against the interests of Canada.
Last year, Peterson formally announced his departure from Canada in favor of moving to the United States, saying his birth nation has become a “totalitarian hell hole.”
Alberta
Alberta calls for tough-on-crime approach from feds

Premier Danielle Smith and Minister of Justice and Attorney General Mickey Amery are demanding Ottawa get serious about drug crimes in Canada.
Premier Smith and Minister Amery have demanded Bill C-5 be repealed in its entirety and the federal government reintroduce mandatory minimum jail sentences for Controlled Drugs and Substances Act (CDSA) offences. Alberta also calls on the federal government to rescind guidelines prepared by the Public Prosecution Service of Canada that direct federal prosecutors to divert drug cases away from the criminal justice system to pursue alternative measures and leave criminal prosecutions for only the most serious cases.
If the federal government does not immediately undertake these actions, Premier Smith and Minister Amery have asked for federal funding to enable the province to permanently take over all CDSA prosecutions.
“For years, Alberta’s government has urged the federal government to reverse their soft-on-crime policies which have allowed illegal drugs to flood our streets and for repeat offenders to prey on our most vulnerable. The federal government must act now and put an end to their insane policies. And if they refuse to, then they must allow the Province of Alberta to take over all prosecutions under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. Let there be no mistake, Alberta’s government will find these dangerous criminals, prosecute them and keep them in jail where they belong.”
When the federal government passed Bill C-5, they further weakened the Canadian justice system and increased potential harm for Canadians by:
- Eliminating all mandatory minimum sentences of imprisonment for CDSA offences;
- Eliminating many mandatory minimum sentences for serious weapons and substance-related offences under the Criminal Code of Canada;
- Removing limitations placed on the use of conditional sentences;
- Forcing both police and prosecutors to first consider referring people to treatment and support programs rather than charging or prosecuting drug possession offences; and
- Continuing to emphasize an approach to drug possession that fails to address the death, disorder and victimization caused by the drug-crime nexus, by focusing narrowly on diversionary measures.
Under Bill C-5, law enforcement has lost the ability to effectively deal with serious crimes, lessening meaningful and impactful enforcement and prosecution. Drug dealers often face very limited consequences, with their charges dismissed or conditional sentences imposed. This allows these criminals to continue profiting from illegal activity while preying on vulnerable populations and worsening the drug crisis in Canada.
“Alberta is deeply concerned about the federal government’s failure to address the growing drug crisis in Canada. Federal prosecution directives and Bill C-5 have significantly weakened our justice system, allowing criminals and drug dealers to exploit loopholes while putting public safety and Canadian lives at risk. We demand immediate action to reverse these disastrous policies, prioritize the safety and well-being of Canadians, and restore Canada’s reputation on an international level.”
Issues with drugs and drug-related crimes continue to worsen in Canada, with drug trafficking often linked to other serious offences such as human trafficking, gun trafficking and money laundering. These concerns have also been underscored by the Trump Administration, which has called for Canada to secure the border to illegal migrant and drug activity. Alberta responded to that request by introducing a $29-million border plan to combat drug smuggling, gun trafficking and other illegal activities. The plan includes a new Sheriffs unit, a 51-officer Interdiction Patrol Team, four K-9 patrol teams, 10 weather surveillance drones and four narcotics analyzers to test for illicit drugs.
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