Marco Navarro-GenieFollowing a question at her first press conference as Alberta premier, Danielle Smith expressed sympathies for unvaccinated Canadians who were persecuted by the COVID-19 regime. Smith mentioned that these Canadians “have been the most discriminated against group that I have witnessed in my lifetime.” It was an “extraordinary period” whose prejudicial practices she found “unacceptable.” Smith’s subjective words are objectively true.

Harsh reactions to Smith’s words followed from those who drove the COVID-19 machine in policy, implementation, and hatred toward fellow unvaccinated Canadians. The strongest pushback came from those who called on governments to use more punitive measures and from those who actually implemented the draconian measures.

Take, for example, Rachel Notley, the leader of the Alberta NDP. Notley was at the head of the mob calling for the incarceration of pastors, whose rights of assembly were violated by unconstitutional protocols and by kangaroo-court blanket injunctions sought and obtained unlawfully behind closed doors. Let us remember that Alberta Health Services presided over the only jurisdiction in Canada that condemned churches and imprisoned preachers, but Notley wanted more. One naturally cringes to think how it might have been had the NDP been in power.

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A look at the most bizarre COVID-19 NDP policy suggestions offers an idea of what COVID-19 regime enthusiasts defend when they attack Smith for her compassion and defence of citizens’ rights. In September 2021, Notley pushed “life-saving COVID-19 vaccinations” in an attempt to coerce more Albertans. Not satisfied with the existing limitations, she pushed the idea further the next day on her personal Twitter account. The NDP leader wanted to investigate and determine who was not vaccinated and why, which is a blatant violation of the privacy of individual Albertans.

There is no legal requirement to disclose reasons for not submitting to a medical procedure. While Notley offered no information on how she would gather the illegal information, earlier that month NDP MLA Thomas Dang hacked into an Alberta Health Services server and unlawfully obtained private health information on other people.

Whether Notley knew of this crime is unknown, but it is interesting that, only weeks later, she suggested using Albertans’ personal health information to create public policies. In her tweet, she suggested that unvaccinated Albertans should be “educated.” While the tweet does not spell out how such re-education would take place, most people know what socialist regimes mean when they say they want to “re-educate” citizens.

She then said: “We need to figure out who isn’t vaccinated against COVID-19, why they’re not, educate them and then take the vaccines directly to them.” A CTV headline mentioned going door-to-door.

People like Notley, who claim “to follow the science” and are always eager to tar their opponents as anti-science, have a habit of not following the science themselves. Two full months before she called for the wholesale violation of citizens’ right to bodily autonomy and privacy, the U.S. Centres for Disease Control reported that the SARS-CoV-2 virus had already spread among 74 per cent of vaccinated individuals in Barnstable, Mass. This was one of the first reported failures of the COVID vaccine in North America, which, up to then, was advertised by medical bureaucrats and politicians as a way out of the pandemic crises.

In fairness to Notley, she was not alone in ignoring the science. National politicians, too, claimed that the jabs offered immunity to infection and presented the fictitious immunity as a reason for coercing people to be vaxxed.

The fiction around the efficacy of immunization also fuelled the paranoia of infection from the unvaxxed, serving to justify firing citizens from their jobs, restricting their movements, and in some cases, even preventing them from accessing shops and services. Newspaper and media pundits fuelled the animosity and stoked public anger against fellow Canadians.

Not once, however, did Notley publicly call for calm or seek to comfort those targeted by ugly popular sentiments. She chose instead, against basic decency, scientific observations, and the mounting evidence to the contrary, to side with the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” narrative peddled by Justin Trudeau, Jason Kenney, and Joe Biden.

None of these leaders have acknowledged their colossal errors, and despite fresh evidence of rising harm from the vaccinations, they have doubled down on the urgency for more vaxes. These so-called leaders blindly followed the “expert advice” of medical bureaucrats, so they are now in no position but to continue vigorously defending it.

The attacks against Danielle Smith’s new policies remind us of the hardships we were forced to live under and all those who blindly imposed them.

Marco Navarro-Génie is a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre and founding president of the Haultain Research Institute. He is co-author, with Barry Cooper, of Canada’s COVID-19: The History of a Pandemic Moral Panic (December 2022).

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