Canada will not survive boring government; nor will any place on a planet that has about 3 years to take extreme measures to stabilize the climate crisis. Step one is NO NEW FOSSIL FUEL EXTRACTION (or exploration). Step Two is treating FFs as the Negative Externalities they are, far from being a key pillar of capitalism which in its late stage is a cancer. Southern debt needs to be cancelled, and global economies must reflect MAPA priorities. This is not your friendly neighborhood crank talking, either. This is what the IPCC WG III report, just released, says. Follow the science so your kids don’t have to kill you to get you out of the way.
After two years of catastrophic Covid policies, driven by a crazy feedback loop of "experts", panic, censorship, government activism, and disregard for our rights as citizens, resulting in a Canada full of division and anger, heavily indebted, and undergoing dramatic price inflation, I would think that non-boring government had been discredited.
You’re not listening. What you are complaining about is in fact Business As Usual. Governments everywhere are owned by corporate elites so even policies that are meant to help the citizenry are overwhelmingly co-opted by those corporate interests. Scientists have been trying to warn us for decades what was coming, in their polite scientist way. After all, facts are facts, so all one need do is share them and everyone behaves rationally, right? Except money, Northern privilege, mysteriously gets in the way. THE PLANET HAS THIRTY (30) MONTHS TO BEGIN REDUCING CARBON EMISSIONS, or our children will never, ever, ever forgive us.
The evidence for your claim that the planet has 30 months is exactly the same kind of evidence for the claim that we needed to immediately implement lockdowns and vax passports, ie questionable modeling and fake expert consensus where science about a real problem is used to demand panicked rights-violating policy. I deny your claim, and in fact state that the catastrophic outcome of the last time we listened to such evidence and enacted panicked rights-violating policy is itself evidence that we should not accept your claim.
Not to mention that, even if one accepted your claim, that doesn't imply Canada should take any drastic/non-boring policy steps. We shouldn't. Boring is good.
As for forgiveness from our children, we have already lost that by harming them so much, senselessly and selfishly, over Covid.
No. It’s the IPCC WG 3 report. It’s scientists like NASA’s Peter Kalmus @climatehuman and thousands of scientists worldwide who risked arrest trying to make people take notice since the report’s official release #ScientistRebellion. Listening to you scoff is like you telling me your neighbourhood pickup game is at the level of the NFL, MLB, NBA etc. I wonder if you have as much skin in the game as others, notably MAPA, but also in terms of you and I: how young we each are and/or the progeny we have. And BTW COVID was a test in empathy and cooperation that is merely a precursor to what is coming for us to survive at 1.5 - NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE BUT STILL TECHNOLOGICALLY ACHIEVABLE (this is where your moderate obstructionism features, btw - you are choosing to contribute to the death of millions mostly in the Global South, this is undeniable science go read it), so we need to do much better than w COVID.
That seems almost too much to ask for. Boring incompetent government would almost be good enough. It's the dramatic actions combined with incompetence that have caused us so much trouble over the last 2 years.
It's like you want to believe COVID isn't real sometimes. How many healthcare systems across this country have collapsed briefly in the last 2 years? I know you said you wouldn't go the ER is you got it...I suspect you might feel differently if you couldn't breathe, but whatever. 35% of ICU beds in Ontario today are occupied by people who are not vaccinated.....they're about 11% of the population.
Ontario has over 2000 ICU beds. 34 of them are occupied by unvaccinated Covid patients. That's 1.5%.
Lockdowns having no effect on Covid rates, as shown by numerous studies, makes ICU numbers completely irrelevant. We have had two years, spent literally a trillion dollars by now, destroyed a vast amount of economic activity with lockdowns, and increased hospital capacity not a bit. In fact, we have reduced it, by driving out unvaccinated health care workers for no reason.
Boring government would be just leaving everything as is, borrowing a bit of money to increase capacity, letting health care workers choose whether or not to be vaccinated. All the heroic things we have done have just made things worse. They should have done the simple things they knew how to do.
Wow. Where to start. Ontario advertises 2400 ICU beds on its website. Doug even said 3000 at a press conference a couple of weeks ago. But that's for everyone...every heart attack, surgery, car accident; not just COVID. Yet all you hear about is the incredible staffing shortages due to a lack of nurses. I doubt we'll ever get accurate information, but I would venture to guess we can't staff 1500ICU beds in Ontario right now. There are lots of hospitals that aren't back to their full slate of medical procedures due to a lack of staff. You're right that only 34 ICU cases are unvaccinated, but 33% of ICU beds are occupied by 10% of the population base....proof that vaccines make a difference.
Lockdowns had no effect on COVID rates. I'd love to see your studies on that. Within weeks of every single lockdown in Ontario, case counts went down.
But what I find hysterical in its naivety is this idea of adding capacity. It takes 4 years to train a nurse. Those that started when COVID began are at least 2 years away from being qualified depending on how much their schooling was interrupted. So add as many beds as you want...how long does it take to build a hospital? None of it matters when you don't have staff to look after it. We were short-staffed when this started, got worse; then Doug tried to stick them with a 1% raise, and others quit. The percentage of nurses who didn't get vaccinated is infinitesimally small; I have yet to see a specific number, but the stress and the hours and the dealing with people dying every day have done far more to harm the profession; one critical to the system. It does not function without nurses. There is a global nursing shortage. There are no spares available, so you can't wave a magic wand and add capacity. Have you listened to nothing that is being said about the staff shortages? In fact, staffing is so bad that they begged healthcare workers to come back to work while they were testing positive as long as they were feeling OK.
What you are advocating is literally the triage medicine that we saw in Milan and New York...where doctors who are not trained for it are making life and death decisions about who gets treatment. Where car accident victims turn up at the ER and are turned away because there's no room. We already know that Saskatchewan stopped their organ donation program for a period of time because it had no ICU space. How would you feel if you were waiting for a kidney? We know that in Ontario proper ICU care was not provided on many occasions because of staffing shortages. And since we know you can catch COVID more than once, this would still be on-going. But you have this illusion that staff will appear from nowhere.
They'd love you in Texas where the GOP suggested that old people should give their lives to protect the economy, With your thinking, there would be no healthcare available anywhere in Canada. I cannot imagine what you are thinking.
We were still in NYC when Hart Island hit the news everywhere. Mass graves of pine boxes were piled one on top of the other and then covered over with dirt by a backhoe. While it was not just Covid patients, it was unknown, unclaimed, essentially mystery people, homelessness in NY is immense being the kind of city it is. 2300 were buried on Hart Island in 2020, more than double the early days of AIDS, or any other epidemic or pandemic.
Maybe Canada needs a Hart Island, a Potters Field, where the indigent and forgotten can be remembered by those folks who don't believe Covid-19 is real.
The unvaxxed are in ICU beds bc they can't breathe bc they have Covid 19. They are sedated and intubated. The other 65% are there for heart attacks, broken bodies due to car crashes, ingestion of some illegal drug and it's reacting poorly, or myriad other reasons. Yes Pat, there are vaccinations and they save lives but you keep telling yourself they are "just shots". Would you like a sucker with that?
Kennedy could have chosen to uphold Albertans' Charter rights and been Canada's Ron DeSantis - popular, vindicated, and looked at for national office.
But instead he caved to media and central Canadian Covidians, and now he is doomed. His few attempts to backpedal are obviously insincere. Serves him right.
He tried the DeSantis approach - don’t you recall “The Best Summer Ever”? By the beginning of September things weren’t looking so good in the province’s hospitals. Even in Alberta freedom isn’t so important to most that people dying at a rate of close to four times as much (343/100 000 death rate in Florida vs. Alberta’s 93.7) is deemed acceptable. There is every chance that sending ICU patients out of province would have convinced “central Canadian Covidians” of his leadership capabilities, but perhaps not in the way that you would anticipate.
It takes a special kind of audacity to assert that Alberta should have done what Florida did and then say that the two jurisdictions cannot be compared.
I suppose that by the same token, we should see the yellow part of the graph in the link below as a flat line, proving that restrictions make no difference.
If you look at multiple jurisdictions, you will see that measures don't predict Covid patterns. It's actually the other way round in many cases - politicians are driven by cases. The places that don't blow with the wind, either remaining closed or open, still show fluctuations.
Of course politicians were driven by cases. Kenney put in restrictions when the situation got bad, took them off when he thought things were under control, and then was forced to implement them once again when things were once again getting out of hand. Once restrictions resumed, case numbers dropped again. The graph in the article I linked to shows how significant the changes were between restrictions and no restrictions. It's obvious to anyone who cares to look.
By that, I'm assuming you're speaking of people who followed the advice of epidemiologists and made decisions based on the abilities of various provincial healthcare systems, as opposed to someone who pretended COVID didn't exist and killed off as many people as possible?
DeSantis convened both pro and anti lockdown epidemiologists and other scientists, discussed the issues with them and evaluated their arguments, using simple heuristics like logic, arithmetic, dispassionate reasoning, and how they engage with their opponents' arguments. That's actually the only sensible way to determine which experts should be listened to. I know that is actually impossible for Trudeau and Ford, because they are simply too stupid even to evaluate an argument, but Kenney, much as I dislike him, is intelligent enough for that.
The alternative, which you seem to prefer, is to let some political or media authority figure determine for you which experts are worth listening to. In that case, you are really letting the politician or journalist make the decision, not the experts. People who go this route often then pretend, despite abundant evidence, that there is an expert "consensus".
I listened to the Ontario Science table. I don't get medical advice from politicians or political advice from doctors. DeSantis is a complete piece of crap as a human being who is a part of a plan to end democracy in the US. Gerrymandering, redistricting and voter suppression are hallmarks of his tactics and those of the GOP in general. That you think he is sensible is probably why I disagree with virtually everything that you post. Pretending COVID isn't happening doesn't mean it's not happening.
"part of a plan to end democracy in the US" - well, conspiracy theorists are hard to debate with. And you still don't seem to realize that there are doctors, epidemiologists, and other scientists outside the Ontario Science Table. All that the OST really have to distinguish them is that Doug Ford endorsed them. Is that really such a good recommendation?
They shot Doug Ford to pieces on numerous occasions because he didn't follow their advice. You're thinking of the CMO who was Dougie's toady.
I'm not at all surprised that in you're in denial of what is happening in the GOP ...where the GOP voted as a unit against voting rights legislation. where 19 states have passed laws restricting voting, where Ohio has tried to redraw maps three times and keeps getting shot down by their Supreme Court because they are too discriminatory. It's not a conspiracy Mark It's reality. If the Democrats, useless as they are, lose either house this November, democracy in the US dies, and a Christian fundamentalist autocracy with minority rule will begin. It's quite clear after the last election that the GOP knows they can't win straight up. So in the states they own, they changed the rules to ensure they get the presidency. Then, they become a clone of Russia. Let's revisit this in 2025.
Don't be silly. The GOP will still call it democracy seeing as they are the leaders of the free world. They will throw about the words patriot and freedom. MTG will speak out loud anywhere that will have her, unless she is in jail. Matt Gaetz, Madison Cawthorn, and Josh Hawley will all chat with Tucker and they will spout freedom some more and MAGA style slogans, throw fist pumps and generally look pleased with themselves but what it is in reality, the beginning of the end of the American Experiment. And the funny thing is many Americans really will flock north if at all possible.
Do you actually believe all that? Pro and anti, evaluated, discuss, heuristics! logic, dispassionate reasoning, etc etc. The man can't tie his shoelaces. Actually, it's the wife who is the brains here. Have you sent this little missive off to Ron? I'm sure he'll invite you for lunch at the mansion.
Thanks Ken. Agree on all fronts. It’s incredible how unlikeable Kenney is, and how many people vehemently hate him and his arrogance, antics, and corruption. I can’t see how the UCP holds it together after how much destruction and division Kenney has created. Exciting or boring, hard to imagine anyone could do worse. For the sake of health care alone I pray Kenney gets kicked out and we can work on repairing the massive damage he has caused.
All that being said, the NDP alternative would be worse. Alberta still has a spening problem. An NDP government emboldened by high energy prices would likely regress into even more bloated health, education and civil service headcount spending.
Notley is likeable and a great communicator, but would take Alberta in the wrong direction. The province needs to kick its addiction to non-renewable energy roylaties, which means:
-reducing the burn rate of spending through further restraint. Despite the progress of the Kenney government, Alberta still funds health and education at nosebleed levels
-relentlessly pursuing economic development through low taxation, efficient regulation and other business friendly policies. Buying diversification through handouts to specific industries or companies would only lead to scandals
The Alberta NDP is basically the political representative of the Alberta public sector unions and allies professions, along with various clients and those reliant on them. The NDP and Alberta unions overlap. You can't trust them to have the interests of those who actually pay the taxes into account.
Or even better....Right to Work legislation within monopoly sectors, like government, were employees by default have highly advantageous bargaining positions. Increased outsourcing would also help by providing a second, competitive supply source.
I'd argue Canadian health care isn't good enough to stay with the status quo. It's mediocre all around, but that might be okay with notoriously cheap Canadians, as long as it stays free.
I wouldn't argue that Canadian health care needs to improve globally. I was referring specifically to the current destruction Kenney is doing in Alberta. As someone on the inside I'm horrified to witness what is happening. Literally every week more and more leaders both physician and non-physician are quitting, staff from the very top of AHS (Dr Yiu's termination) all the way to the office admins and hospital staff are quitting and abandoning their posts. I learned of 10 surgeons in Calgary last week alone who have announced their premature retirement because of disenfranchisement and disgust with Kenney. Literally important hard working people are quitting and leaving droves. Kenney's veiled push for privatization to enrich himself and his closest allies through the "Alberta surgical initiative" will further erode our already strained workforce, and will do nothing to fix wait times or improve care. Kenney's hiring of Stephen Harpers son Ben, who has no real world expertise or credentials, as the so-called data expert to lead this initiative, while shutting out AHS who actually is responsible, is corruption and patronage at its highest levels. Lets all pray for a new leader.
That just highlights the dangers of a health care monopoly, whether it be private or public. Canada desperately needs a second tier of health care, to at least provide options. Right now, those staff who give the public system a vote of no confidence have to leave, which doesn't serve anyone's interests.
We also need to address to blatant supply managing of doctors in this country, purposefully not educating enough doctors, both to manage use of the system via waiting lists (since can't via fees), and to ensure higher incomes for current doctors.
Alberta mimicked a certain US president in its handling of COVID with predictable results.
5 years ago, Notley wanted to ship Alberta oil by rail. How many thousand barrels shipped by train would now be bringing dollars into the province if that idea hadn't been cancelled by Kenney?
The WCS-WTI differential has been too small since about mid 2019 to support oil by rail. The Kenney government dumped the contracts at ~$2B loss to avoid even heavier losses.
Comparing a politician, or anyone, to a well known other personality, be they popular or unpopular, is an intellectually lazy move to avoid actual reasoning.
And now that the product is at an economically advantageous price, Alberta is handicapped. So along with Keystone, that's $3 billion he's thrown in the toilet. Pipelines that don't exist don't move any product. Call it lazy if you wish, but her plan was functional and good for Albertans. Jason's is wasted money; zero return. Is there any worse way for a politician to betray the taxpayer?
The fact of the differential being insufficient to cover the cost of rail transport is absolute proof that those extra barrels don't exist. The energy industry has been burned by incoherent government policy too many times and won't add new barrels until MAYBE incremental pipeline capacity is in place.
With diesel prices skyrocketing, rail bottlenecks and the prospect of competition from increasingly valuable agricultural commodities, the economics of oil by rail will only decline further.
Yet you're happy to pay billions to build pipelines. If you'd committed to oil by rail in Harpers days, you'd have all the capacity you could ever ask for at a fraction of the price. And you wouldn't have to pay to clean it up when it's not needed. Despite Pierre's prognostications, more pipelines aren't coming any time soon.
The energy industry are pond scum near as I can tell these days; raping the consumer to appease their shareholders like too many other businesses.
Alberta had their chance; Jason killed it. Opportunity missed.
The problem isn't the UCP or NDP, the problem is Kenney. The guy just won't leave a party he isn't welcome in anymore. It's weird and has the stench of the pathetic.
It's been obvious the last three years that Kenney sees Albertans as a problem to be managed, from his Ottawa heavy staff to his frequent forays and opportune extended trips. I honestly don't think Kenney likes Albertans much, left or right. We are just another stepping stone and tool for him.
Alberta is fundamentally a conservative province and it's people are self reliant go-getter sorts. An undivided right with an acceptable leader who can bridge groups (hello Toews and Schweitzer!) will win every time.
Kenney isn't trusted either, especially by insiders within the party, so this isn't going to be pretty. The best thing for Alberta would be if he just walked away, but he won't do that.
The issue was more that Kenney tolerated too much public discent within the party. People like Drew Barnes should have been ejected way earlier. If Kenney does survive, he should clean house by not approving the nominations of trouble making MLA's seeking re-election.
Message control is essential to presenting the party in a professional manner and avoiding the distraction of bozo eruptions. Harper leaened this post 2004.
While many Albertans may feel personally vindicated by showing Kenney the door, the implication will be an NDP government and all the high spending, public sector union priorities and over the top environmentalism that will bring. Alberta is a contrarian province in all aspects. It is about to enter the phase (high inflation, high commodity prices) where being out of phase can be extremely beneficial. An NDP government would blow that opportuinity.
Looking at per capita GDP and business creation rates, only Alberta has numbers that compare with the wealthier US states. All other provinces compared to US states are on the lower end. Without Alberta's (and BC's) contribution to Canada's economy this country would be on the lower end of the OECD rankings. Even with Alberta, Canada's GDP per capita doesn't compare with peer nations except the UK.
Alaska. Less established etc etc. Most of the red states are very well established and except for a few who are clinging to blowing off mountain tops to get at what little coal is left and also do not have a good collage or state football team and who also do not have several military bases and defence contracts, well yeah, sucks to be them. But lobbyists do love the gop.
The current moment in Alberta politics seems to rhyme with the early '90s - Alberta's a decade away from the end of a long economic boom, an incumbent government is trying various measures to recapture former glory and getting buffeted by a variety of crises, and there's infighting between blue and red conservatives. Meanwhile, the main opposition party is led by a popular Edmonton leader who looks set to scoop up the red conservatives if the conservative leadership battle goes the wrong way. What I don't see is a Ralph Klein figure in the wings who can yank the rural conservatives into line and win the urban vote.
I haven't lived in Alberta for 20 years, so it's become an increasingly foreign place to me. However, I see an increasing chasm between the political outlook of my urban friends and relatives in Edmonton and the rural ones from the vicinity of Red Deer and Lethbridge. What they've got in common is a tendency to overestimate the strength and popularity of their own positions because of the bubbles they live in. Alberta's been moving towards an increasingly urban population, though - I think an NDP with a strong base among urban voters is going to have the upper hand over a UCP where an increasingly dissonant rural faction can only act as spoilers.
In the early 90's, the Decore Liberals were arguably further to the right than the late Getty/very early Klein PC's. Decore campaigned on massive austerity.
You discount Calgary, and Calgary is not an NDP town. It just isn't. It's a Red Tory town in the inner city and staunchly conservative (small c) in the outer suburbs. The math just doesn't add up for the NDP. Fortress Edmonton for them is just not enough.
Except, of course, the NDP *did* take enough of Calgary in 2015 to win the election. The question is how much do you have to add to your base to win, and how accessible are they? The rural UCP faction hasn’t even got the strength to carry a majority in the UCP caucus, let alone garner enough support for their positions to win provincially. However, the UCP can’t win without them either.
Just to be annoying, I will dub them the "Konvoy Kooks", since Jason has OK'd the word.
If Notley has any political savvy at all, she'll be reminding people that they had a stated objective to "overthrow the government". Then asking all the contenders - certainly Mr. Jean - whether they abjure the Kooks and will cast them into the outer darkness of the party.
If she fails to tie the convoy and every embarrassing thing anybody in it ever said, tightly to the UPC, she deserves to lose. They've handed her a self-own, when I really thought that in Alberta, of all places, the NDP hadn't a prayer.
Albertans blamed the UCP for an oil price drop caused by Saudi and Russia (and frackers, of course), then blamed Notley for the same price drop that happened before she was elected, which takes some real blaming skills. By the same token, the UCP will be *credited*, with the price-rise caused, again, by Russia, so they definitely have a chance.
Very true - Kenney can't easily argue in favour of the convoy supporters' desire for Canadians to be treated equally and not have their Charter rights violated because he himself treated Albertans unequally and violated their Charter rights.
But, with a new leader, the question of civil rights can be relitigated, if Notley wants to go there. Could Jean tie every arrested pastor, every closed playground, and every closed school to Notley? Tricky, since the UCP imposed these crazy policies. But possible - all he needs to do is point out that Covid is a seasonal virus, and Notley plans to bring them all back. It doesn't need to be true, just plausible.
Kenny has had a flood of criticism from the start. Climate change folks have been lined up against him, and unions were prepared to blast him from the start. Having to try and balance a budget left him exposed to criticisms about social services which always suffer during cut backs and the medical system is aligned against him because the doctors don't like lower incomes and the nurses are essentially unionized and are therefore aligned with the NDP. Add to this the problems with an immature cabinet and it is like a turkey shoot for the opposition.
The only advantage to sticking Brian Jean in instead is that he has not taken fire so far and has therefore not been wounded in action. The opposition is still going to blame the party rather than the person. Whoever goes into the next election better have their talking points down.
I remember vividly the time Kenney passed off a photo of a graduation at a girl's school in Kenya as a sex-slave auction conducted by ISIS. How can anybody trust a cynical character like that?
Agreed...that was in the 80's when he was in his late teens attending a very socially conservative Catholic university. That is at least as forgivable as an early 30 something politician wearing blackface to work event in the early 2000's.
Kenney failed Albertan's and the UCP. He did not move forward on any of the fronts to try and secure some independence from the Trudeau Liberal/NDP Coalition, as it now stands. The one promise kept was the referendum against equalization that went flat and we never heard more about it after the vote was taken. His talk of forcing the Federal Government and fellow Provincial leaders to the table was but wishful thinking.
Kenney is a Federal Politician and was running the UCP as such but politics in Alberta does not work that way as everyone is allowed input. By denigrating and pushing members out due to them not following his dictate caused further problems. Most was over our Charter Rights which Kenney said he would stand up for.
Thanks Ken. Loved the links. I have heard about the kooks but it is much better to listen to him. Danielle Smith, she of the picture on the bus? Jean was interesting. Is he for real? One comment on the political prisioner on Twitter and everyone is disabusing him of being a lawyer, criminal or otherwise. But then on FB they are all crying a river for poor Lich (about a bail hearing) sheesh. Long posts on FB work best for Brian Jean.
Alberta is coming into a sweet spot. High energy prices, high commodity prices ( let’s hope for bountiful crops), potential for young, energetic, English speaking immigrants to fill job vacancies. No whining and “woe are us” please.
I find your comment truly disturbing. Unionized employees, in what you call monopoly sectors, are the people you are unable to determine are worthy or a slight difference you cannot determine their worth? Those in other monopoly sectors are so much more transparent as they are not unionized?
The only ways to truely guage one's employment worth is to look for work somewhere else, or have your worth periodically measured against that of others. That does not occur within the unionized public sector.
"I wager that what Albertans need more than anything right now is good, boring government. "
And Canada, too.
Canada will not survive boring government; nor will any place on a planet that has about 3 years to take extreme measures to stabilize the climate crisis. Step one is NO NEW FOSSIL FUEL EXTRACTION (or exploration). Step Two is treating FFs as the Negative Externalities they are, far from being a key pillar of capitalism which in its late stage is a cancer. Southern debt needs to be cancelled, and global economies must reflect MAPA priorities. This is not your friendly neighborhood crank talking, either. This is what the IPCC WG III report, just released, says. Follow the science so your kids don’t have to kill you to get you out of the way.
After two years of catastrophic Covid policies, driven by a crazy feedback loop of "experts", panic, censorship, government activism, and disregard for our rights as citizens, resulting in a Canada full of division and anger, heavily indebted, and undergoing dramatic price inflation, I would think that non-boring government had been discredited.
You’re not listening. What you are complaining about is in fact Business As Usual. Governments everywhere are owned by corporate elites so even policies that are meant to help the citizenry are overwhelmingly co-opted by those corporate interests. Scientists have been trying to warn us for decades what was coming, in their polite scientist way. After all, facts are facts, so all one need do is share them and everyone behaves rationally, right? Except money, Northern privilege, mysteriously gets in the way. THE PLANET HAS THIRTY (30) MONTHS TO BEGIN REDUCING CARBON EMISSIONS, or our children will never, ever, ever forgive us.
The evidence for your claim that the planet has 30 months is exactly the same kind of evidence for the claim that we needed to immediately implement lockdowns and vax passports, ie questionable modeling and fake expert consensus where science about a real problem is used to demand panicked rights-violating policy. I deny your claim, and in fact state that the catastrophic outcome of the last time we listened to such evidence and enacted panicked rights-violating policy is itself evidence that we should not accept your claim.
Not to mention that, even if one accepted your claim, that doesn't imply Canada should take any drastic/non-boring policy steps. We shouldn't. Boring is good.
As for forgiveness from our children, we have already lost that by harming them so much, senselessly and selfishly, over Covid.
No. It’s the IPCC WG 3 report. It’s scientists like NASA’s Peter Kalmus @climatehuman and thousands of scientists worldwide who risked arrest trying to make people take notice since the report’s official release #ScientistRebellion. Listening to you scoff is like you telling me your neighbourhood pickup game is at the level of the NFL, MLB, NBA etc. I wonder if you have as much skin in the game as others, notably MAPA, but also in terms of you and I: how young we each are and/or the progeny we have. And BTW COVID was a test in empathy and cooperation that is merely a precursor to what is coming for us to survive at 1.5 - NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE BUT STILL TECHNOLOGICALLY ACHIEVABLE (this is where your moderate obstructionism features, btw - you are choosing to contribute to the death of millions mostly in the Global South, this is undeniable science go read it), so we need to do much better than w COVID.
No why GHG will even come close to reversing growth within 30 months, so best to enjoy those last 30 months and stay off the Internet
Nothing like a little ad hominem to make the social media bummer machine (see Jaron Lanier) go round. Shall I do my part and call you an oil shill?
Sir David King has a different perspective but why listen to him?
Damn that TMX.
Of course, you'll use the EIA predictions.
Project Cauldron? When?
From your lips to God's ears, Bill. Well said.
That seems almost too much to ask for. Boring incompetent government would almost be good enough. It's the dramatic actions combined with incompetence that have caused us so much trouble over the last 2 years.
It's like you want to believe COVID isn't real sometimes. How many healthcare systems across this country have collapsed briefly in the last 2 years? I know you said you wouldn't go the ER is you got it...I suspect you might feel differently if you couldn't breathe, but whatever. 35% of ICU beds in Ontario today are occupied by people who are not vaccinated.....they're about 11% of the population.
Ontario has over 2000 ICU beds. 34 of them are occupied by unvaccinated Covid patients. That's 1.5%.
Lockdowns having no effect on Covid rates, as shown by numerous studies, makes ICU numbers completely irrelevant. We have had two years, spent literally a trillion dollars by now, destroyed a vast amount of economic activity with lockdowns, and increased hospital capacity not a bit. In fact, we have reduced it, by driving out unvaccinated health care workers for no reason.
Boring government would be just leaving everything as is, borrowing a bit of money to increase capacity, letting health care workers choose whether or not to be vaccinated. All the heroic things we have done have just made things worse. They should have done the simple things they knew how to do.
Wow. Where to start. Ontario advertises 2400 ICU beds on its website. Doug even said 3000 at a press conference a couple of weeks ago. But that's for everyone...every heart attack, surgery, car accident; not just COVID. Yet all you hear about is the incredible staffing shortages due to a lack of nurses. I doubt we'll ever get accurate information, but I would venture to guess we can't staff 1500ICU beds in Ontario right now. There are lots of hospitals that aren't back to their full slate of medical procedures due to a lack of staff. You're right that only 34 ICU cases are unvaccinated, but 33% of ICU beds are occupied by 10% of the population base....proof that vaccines make a difference.
Lockdowns had no effect on COVID rates. I'd love to see your studies on that. Within weeks of every single lockdown in Ontario, case counts went down.
But what I find hysterical in its naivety is this idea of adding capacity. It takes 4 years to train a nurse. Those that started when COVID began are at least 2 years away from being qualified depending on how much their schooling was interrupted. So add as many beds as you want...how long does it take to build a hospital? None of it matters when you don't have staff to look after it. We were short-staffed when this started, got worse; then Doug tried to stick them with a 1% raise, and others quit. The percentage of nurses who didn't get vaccinated is infinitesimally small; I have yet to see a specific number, but the stress and the hours and the dealing with people dying every day have done far more to harm the profession; one critical to the system. It does not function without nurses. There is a global nursing shortage. There are no spares available, so you can't wave a magic wand and add capacity. Have you listened to nothing that is being said about the staff shortages? In fact, staffing is so bad that they begged healthcare workers to come back to work while they were testing positive as long as they were feeling OK.
What you are advocating is literally the triage medicine that we saw in Milan and New York...where doctors who are not trained for it are making life and death decisions about who gets treatment. Where car accident victims turn up at the ER and are turned away because there's no room. We already know that Saskatchewan stopped their organ donation program for a period of time because it had no ICU space. How would you feel if you were waiting for a kidney? We know that in Ontario proper ICU care was not provided on many occasions because of staffing shortages. And since we know you can catch COVID more than once, this would still be on-going. But you have this illusion that staff will appear from nowhere.
They'd love you in Texas where the GOP suggested that old people should give their lives to protect the economy, With your thinking, there would be no healthcare available anywhere in Canada. I cannot imagine what you are thinking.
We were still in NYC when Hart Island hit the news everywhere. Mass graves of pine boxes were piled one on top of the other and then covered over with dirt by a backhoe. While it was not just Covid patients, it was unknown, unclaimed, essentially mystery people, homelessness in NY is immense being the kind of city it is. 2300 were buried on Hart Island in 2020, more than double the early days of AIDS, or any other epidemic or pandemic.
Maybe Canada needs a Hart Island, a Potters Field, where the indigent and forgotten can be remembered by those folks who don't believe Covid-19 is real.
Damn but I'm glad you aren't our boring gov.
The unvaxxed are in ICU beds bc they can't breathe bc they have Covid 19. They are sedated and intubated. The other 65% are there for heart attacks, broken bodies due to car crashes, ingestion of some illegal drug and it's reacting poorly, or myriad other reasons. Yes Pat, there are vaccinations and they save lives but you keep telling yourself they are "just shots". Would you like a sucker with that?
Kennedy could have chosen to uphold Albertans' Charter rights and been Canada's Ron DeSantis - popular, vindicated, and looked at for national office.
But instead he caved to media and central Canadian Covidians, and now he is doomed. His few attempts to backpedal are obviously insincere. Serves him right.
He tried the DeSantis approach - don’t you recall “The Best Summer Ever”? By the beginning of September things weren’t looking so good in the province’s hospitals. Even in Alberta freedom isn’t so important to most that people dying at a rate of close to four times as much (343/100 000 death rate in Florida vs. Alberta’s 93.7) is deemed acceptable. There is every chance that sending ICU patients out of province would have convinced “central Canadian Covidians” of his leadership capabilities, but perhaps not in the way that you would anticipate.
He wanted to do a DeSantis, 9 months late, but lost his nerve.
Since lockdowns and vax passports had zero effect, he should have stuck to his guns. Same outcome on Covid, better economy, no rights violations.
You need to compare comparables - eg California vs Florida.
It takes a special kind of audacity to assert that Alberta should have done what Florida did and then say that the two jurisdictions cannot be compared.
I suppose that by the same token, we should see the yellow part of the graph in the link below as a flat line, proving that restrictions make no difference.
https://smartcdn.prod.postmedia.digital/edmontonjournal/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/1127-COVID19-BarGraph.jpg
If you look at multiple jurisdictions, you will see that measures don't predict Covid patterns. It's actually the other way round in many cases - politicians are driven by cases. The places that don't blow with the wind, either remaining closed or open, still show fluctuations.
Of course politicians were driven by cases. Kenney put in restrictions when the situation got bad, took them off when he thought things were under control, and then was forced to implement them once again when things were once again getting out of hand. Once restrictions resumed, case numbers dropped again. The graph in the article I linked to shows how significant the changes were between restrictions and no restrictions. It's obvious to anyone who cares to look.
By that, I'm assuming you're speaking of people who followed the advice of epidemiologists and made decisions based on the abilities of various provincial healthcare systems, as opposed to someone who pretended COVID didn't exist and killed off as many people as possible?
DeSantis convened both pro and anti lockdown epidemiologists and other scientists, discussed the issues with them and evaluated their arguments, using simple heuristics like logic, arithmetic, dispassionate reasoning, and how they engage with their opponents' arguments. That's actually the only sensible way to determine which experts should be listened to. I know that is actually impossible for Trudeau and Ford, because they are simply too stupid even to evaluate an argument, but Kenney, much as I dislike him, is intelligent enough for that.
The alternative, which you seem to prefer, is to let some political or media authority figure determine for you which experts are worth listening to. In that case, you are really letting the politician or journalist make the decision, not the experts. People who go this route often then pretend, despite abundant evidence, that there is an expert "consensus".
I listened to the Ontario Science table. I don't get medical advice from politicians or political advice from doctors. DeSantis is a complete piece of crap as a human being who is a part of a plan to end democracy in the US. Gerrymandering, redistricting and voter suppression are hallmarks of his tactics and those of the GOP in general. That you think he is sensible is probably why I disagree with virtually everything that you post. Pretending COVID isn't happening doesn't mean it's not happening.
"part of a plan to end democracy in the US" - well, conspiracy theorists are hard to debate with. And you still don't seem to realize that there are doctors, epidemiologists, and other scientists outside the Ontario Science Table. All that the OST really have to distinguish them is that Doug Ford endorsed them. Is that really such a good recommendation?
They shot Doug Ford to pieces on numerous occasions because he didn't follow their advice. You're thinking of the CMO who was Dougie's toady.
I'm not at all surprised that in you're in denial of what is happening in the GOP ...where the GOP voted as a unit against voting rights legislation. where 19 states have passed laws restricting voting, where Ohio has tried to redraw maps three times and keeps getting shot down by their Supreme Court because they are too discriminatory. It's not a conspiracy Mark It's reality. If the Democrats, useless as they are, lose either house this November, democracy in the US dies, and a Christian fundamentalist autocracy with minority rule will begin. It's quite clear after the last election that the GOP knows they can't win straight up. So in the states they own, they changed the rules to ensure they get the presidency. Then, they become a clone of Russia. Let's revisit this in 2025.
Don't be silly. The GOP will still call it democracy seeing as they are the leaders of the free world. They will throw about the words patriot and freedom. MTG will speak out loud anywhere that will have her, unless she is in jail. Matt Gaetz, Madison Cawthorn, and Josh Hawley will all chat with Tucker and they will spout freedom some more and MAGA style slogans, throw fist pumps and generally look pleased with themselves but what it is in reality, the beginning of the end of the American Experiment. And the funny thing is many Americans really will flock north if at all possible.
Do you actually believe all that? Pro and anti, evaluated, discuss, heuristics! logic, dispassionate reasoning, etc etc. The man can't tie his shoelaces. Actually, it's the wife who is the brains here. Have you sent this little missive off to Ron? I'm sure he'll invite you for lunch at the mansion.
DeSantis, baby Trump wannabe. He hasn't a clue what he's about.
Thanks Ken. Agree on all fronts. It’s incredible how unlikeable Kenney is, and how many people vehemently hate him and his arrogance, antics, and corruption. I can’t see how the UCP holds it together after how much destruction and division Kenney has created. Exciting or boring, hard to imagine anyone could do worse. For the sake of health care alone I pray Kenney gets kicked out and we can work on repairing the massive damage he has caused.
All that being said, the NDP alternative would be worse. Alberta still has a spening problem. An NDP government emboldened by high energy prices would likely regress into even more bloated health, education and civil service headcount spending.
Notley is likeable and a great communicator, but would take Alberta in the wrong direction. The province needs to kick its addiction to non-renewable energy roylaties, which means:
-reducing the burn rate of spending through further restraint. Despite the progress of the Kenney government, Alberta still funds health and education at nosebleed levels
-relentlessly pursuing economic development through low taxation, efficient regulation and other business friendly policies. Buying diversification through handouts to specific industries or companies would only lead to scandals
The Alberta NDP is basically the political representative of the Alberta public sector unions and allies professions, along with various clients and those reliant on them. The NDP and Alberta unions overlap. You can't trust them to have the interests of those who actually pay the taxes into account.
Or even better....Right to Work legislation within monopoly sectors, like government, were employees by default have highly advantageous bargaining positions. Increased outsourcing would also help by providing a second, competitive supply source.
Yes and below market total compensation. Less risk (aka job security) has to mean less reward
I'd argue Canadian health care isn't good enough to stay with the status quo. It's mediocre all around, but that might be okay with notoriously cheap Canadians, as long as it stays free.
I wouldn't argue that Canadian health care needs to improve globally. I was referring specifically to the current destruction Kenney is doing in Alberta. As someone on the inside I'm horrified to witness what is happening. Literally every week more and more leaders both physician and non-physician are quitting, staff from the very top of AHS (Dr Yiu's termination) all the way to the office admins and hospital staff are quitting and abandoning their posts. I learned of 10 surgeons in Calgary last week alone who have announced their premature retirement because of disenfranchisement and disgust with Kenney. Literally important hard working people are quitting and leaving droves. Kenney's veiled push for privatization to enrich himself and his closest allies through the "Alberta surgical initiative" will further erode our already strained workforce, and will do nothing to fix wait times or improve care. Kenney's hiring of Stephen Harpers son Ben, who has no real world expertise or credentials, as the so-called data expert to lead this initiative, while shutting out AHS who actually is responsible, is corruption and patronage at its highest levels. Lets all pray for a new leader.
That just highlights the dangers of a health care monopoly, whether it be private or public. Canada desperately needs a second tier of health care, to at least provide options. Right now, those staff who give the public system a vote of no confidence have to leave, which doesn't serve anyone's interests.
We also need to address to blatant supply managing of doctors in this country, purposefully not educating enough doctors, both to manage use of the system via waiting lists (since can't via fees), and to ensure higher incomes for current doctors.
Outsourcing is not privatization
Alberta mimicked a certain US president in its handling of COVID with predictable results.
5 years ago, Notley wanted to ship Alberta oil by rail. How many thousand barrels shipped by train would now be bringing dollars into the province if that idea hadn't been cancelled by Kenney?
The WCS-WTI differential has been too small since about mid 2019 to support oil by rail. The Kenney government dumped the contracts at ~$2B loss to avoid even heavier losses.
Comparing a politician, or anyone, to a well known other personality, be they popular or unpopular, is an intellectually lazy move to avoid actual reasoning.
And now that the product is at an economically advantageous price, Alberta is handicapped. So along with Keystone, that's $3 billion he's thrown in the toilet. Pipelines that don't exist don't move any product. Call it lazy if you wish, but her plan was functional and good for Albertans. Jason's is wasted money; zero return. Is there any worse way for a politician to betray the taxpayer?
The fact of the differential being insufficient to cover the cost of rail transport is absolute proof that those extra barrels don't exist. The energy industry has been burned by incoherent government policy too many times and won't add new barrels until MAYBE incremental pipeline capacity is in place.
With diesel prices skyrocketing, rail bottlenecks and the prospect of competition from increasingly valuable agricultural commodities, the economics of oil by rail will only decline further.
Yet you're happy to pay billions to build pipelines. If you'd committed to oil by rail in Harpers days, you'd have all the capacity you could ever ask for at a fraction of the price. And you wouldn't have to pay to clean it up when it's not needed. Despite Pierre's prognostications, more pipelines aren't coming any time soon.
The energy industry are pond scum near as I can tell these days; raping the consumer to appease their shareholders like too many other businesses.
Alberta had their chance; Jason killed it. Opportunity missed.
The party was founded in a sleazy fashion and has maintained that culture. What a surprise!
The problem isn't the UCP or NDP, the problem is Kenney. The guy just won't leave a party he isn't welcome in anymore. It's weird and has the stench of the pathetic.
It's been obvious the last three years that Kenney sees Albertans as a problem to be managed, from his Ottawa heavy staff to his frequent forays and opportune extended trips. I honestly don't think Kenney likes Albertans much, left or right. We are just another stepping stone and tool for him.
Alberta is fundamentally a conservative province and it's people are self reliant go-getter sorts. An undivided right with an acceptable leader who can bridge groups (hello Toews and Schweitzer!) will win every time.
Kenney isn't trusted either, especially by insiders within the party, so this isn't going to be pretty. The best thing for Alberta would be if he just walked away, but he won't do that.
The issue was more that Kenney tolerated too much public discent within the party. People like Drew Barnes should have been ejected way earlier. If Kenney does survive, he should clean house by not approving the nominations of trouble making MLA's seeking re-election.
Message control is essential to presenting the party in a professional manner and avoiding the distraction of bozo eruptions. Harper leaened this post 2004.
While many Albertans may feel personally vindicated by showing Kenney the door, the implication will be an NDP government and all the high spending, public sector union priorities and over the top environmentalism that will bring. Alberta is a contrarian province in all aspects. It is about to enter the phase (high inflation, high commodity prices) where being out of phase can be extremely beneficial. An NDP government would blow that opportuinity.
Looking at per capita GDP and business creation rates, only Alberta has numbers that compare with the wealthier US states. All other provinces compared to US states are on the lower end. Without Alberta's (and BC's) contribution to Canada's economy this country would be on the lower end of the OECD rankings. Even with Alberta, Canada's GDP per capita doesn't compare with peer nations except the UK.
They also tend to be the more established states with more mature economies and higher costs of living, hence the wealth
Alaska. Less established etc etc. Most of the red states are very well established and except for a few who are clinging to blowing off mountain tops to get at what little coal is left and also do not have a good collage or state football team and who also do not have several military bases and defence contracts, well yeah, sucks to be them. But lobbyists do love the gop.
The current moment in Alberta politics seems to rhyme with the early '90s - Alberta's a decade away from the end of a long economic boom, an incumbent government is trying various measures to recapture former glory and getting buffeted by a variety of crises, and there's infighting between blue and red conservatives. Meanwhile, the main opposition party is led by a popular Edmonton leader who looks set to scoop up the red conservatives if the conservative leadership battle goes the wrong way. What I don't see is a Ralph Klein figure in the wings who can yank the rural conservatives into line and win the urban vote.
I haven't lived in Alberta for 20 years, so it's become an increasingly foreign place to me. However, I see an increasing chasm between the political outlook of my urban friends and relatives in Edmonton and the rural ones from the vicinity of Red Deer and Lethbridge. What they've got in common is a tendency to overestimate the strength and popularity of their own positions because of the bubbles they live in. Alberta's been moving towards an increasingly urban population, though - I think an NDP with a strong base among urban voters is going to have the upper hand over a UCP where an increasingly dissonant rural faction can only act as spoilers.
In the early 90's, the Decore Liberals were arguably further to the right than the late Getty/very early Klein PC's. Decore campaigned on massive austerity.
You discount Calgary, and Calgary is not an NDP town. It just isn't. It's a Red Tory town in the inner city and staunchly conservative (small c) in the outer suburbs. The math just doesn't add up for the NDP. Fortress Edmonton for them is just not enough.
Except, of course, the NDP *did* take enough of Calgary in 2015 to win the election. The question is how much do you have to add to your base to win, and how accessible are they? The rural UCP faction hasn’t even got the strength to carry a majority in the UCP caucus, let alone garner enough support for their positions to win provincially. However, the UCP can’t win without them either.
Just to be annoying, I will dub them the "Konvoy Kooks", since Jason has OK'd the word.
If Notley has any political savvy at all, she'll be reminding people that they had a stated objective to "overthrow the government". Then asking all the contenders - certainly Mr. Jean - whether they abjure the Kooks and will cast them into the outer darkness of the party.
If she fails to tie the convoy and every embarrassing thing anybody in it ever said, tightly to the UPC, she deserves to lose. They've handed her a self-own, when I really thought that in Alberta, of all places, the NDP hadn't a prayer.
Albertans blamed the UCP for an oil price drop caused by Saudi and Russia (and frackers, of course), then blamed Notley for the same price drop that happened before she was elected, which takes some real blaming skills. By the same token, the UCP will be *credited*, with the price-rise caused, again, by Russia, so they definitely have a chance.
Very true - Kenney can't easily argue in favour of the convoy supporters' desire for Canadians to be treated equally and not have their Charter rights violated because he himself treated Albertans unequally and violated their Charter rights.
But, with a new leader, the question of civil rights can be relitigated, if Notley wants to go there. Could Jean tie every arrested pastor, every closed playground, and every closed school to Notley? Tricky, since the UCP imposed these crazy policies. But possible - all he needs to do is point out that Covid is a seasonal virus, and Notley plans to bring them all back. It doesn't need to be true, just plausible.
I will admit to some surprise at your last sentence.
Not much, but some.
Kenny has had a flood of criticism from the start. Climate change folks have been lined up against him, and unions were prepared to blast him from the start. Having to try and balance a budget left him exposed to criticisms about social services which always suffer during cut backs and the medical system is aligned against him because the doctors don't like lower incomes and the nurses are essentially unionized and are therefore aligned with the NDP. Add to this the problems with an immature cabinet and it is like a turkey shoot for the opposition.
The only advantage to sticking Brian Jean in instead is that he has not taken fire so far and has therefore not been wounded in action. The opposition is still going to blame the party rather than the person. Whoever goes into the next election better have their talking points down.
I'm supporting Kenny in the confidence vote.
I remember vividly the time Kenney passed off a photo of a graduation at a girl's school in Kenya as a sex-slave auction conducted by ISIS. How can anybody trust a cynical character like that?
Any worse than the Liberals during the 2015 exploting the death of Alan Kurdi? Political operatives will do whatever it takes to stir up emotions.
At least the drowning death of Alan Kurdi was a genuine tragedy, not a photo faked up and moved to another continent.
...but it had nothing to do with Harper allegedly turning down his family's immigration request as was the Liberal/CBC narrative.
Agreed...that was in the 80's when he was in his late teens attending a very socially conservative Catholic university. That is at least as forgivable as an early 30 something politician wearing blackface to work event in the early 2000's.
Kenney failed Albertan's and the UCP. He did not move forward on any of the fronts to try and secure some independence from the Trudeau Liberal/NDP Coalition, as it now stands. The one promise kept was the referendum against equalization that went flat and we never heard more about it after the vote was taken. His talk of forcing the Federal Government and fellow Provincial leaders to the table was but wishful thinking.
Kenney is a Federal Politician and was running the UCP as such but politics in Alberta does not work that way as everyone is allowed input. By denigrating and pushing members out due to them not following his dictate caused further problems. Most was over our Charter Rights which Kenney said he would stand up for.
Thanks Ken. Loved the links. I have heard about the kooks but it is much better to listen to him. Danielle Smith, she of the picture on the bus? Jean was interesting. Is he for real? One comment on the political prisioner on Twitter and everyone is disabusing him of being a lawyer, criminal or otherwise. But then on FB they are all crying a river for poor Lich (about a bail hearing) sheesh. Long posts on FB work best for Brian Jean.
Alberta is coming into a sweet spot. High energy prices, high commodity prices ( let’s hope for bountiful crops), potential for young, energetic, English speaking immigrants to fill job vacancies. No whining and “woe are us” please.
Jason opened his mouth and...
Nothing worth listening to came out over and over again.
"Best Summer Ever"!
Pffftt!
You forgot the teachers and nurses unions.
Why oh why do people not want to pay their teachers, nurses, firefighters, and so on. Do they honestly think they are not worth it?
No way to know their worth as they are unionized within monopoly sectors.
I find your comment truly disturbing. Unionized employees, in what you call monopoly sectors, are the people you are unable to determine are worthy or a slight difference you cannot determine their worth? Those in other monopoly sectors are so much more transparent as they are not unionized?
The only ways to truely guage one's employment worth is to look for work somewhere else, or have your worth periodically measured against that of others. That does not occur within the unionized public sector.
Problem is that no one actually knows what those "PC Roots" are? Liberal lite?
Or "don't blink" era Ralph Klein