Shame about Bonnie Henry. She and our CMO, Deena Hinshaw, were well-regarded as the only sane people during all this.
Hinshaw attained superstar status herself, with people doing portraits of her, and she caused a fashion sensation by wearing a dress with the periodic table on it. People wanted to know where she got it so they could get one, and evidently it was made by a small fashion house that had recently closed due to the pandemic. So they reopened, parceled out the tasks required to make the clothing (the sewing was done at home), and remained in business.
But...
We have Jason Kenney running the province. Kenney, who was Harper's lapdog. Kenney who helped lose the election for the Reformacons (not that I mind) because he wouldn't let a Muslim woman take the citizenship oath while wearing a niqab, so she sued the government and won. The political fallout over this was that the NDP supporters in Quebec wanted Mulcair to back the position of 'no face coverings while taking the oath' but he wouldn't, citing her Charter rights. His support evaporated, and went to other parties, but mostly the Liberals. It was enough seats to give them a majority.
Kenney can't allow women to show him up. Ever. He never misses an opportunity to slag Rachel Notley, our former premier, and his cabinet ministers' FB posts are also full of swipes against the NDP whether what they say is factual or not. They and their supporters can't leave politics out of the pandemic and are rejecting sound advice and suggestions and recommendations just because they come from an NDP source.
And then there's the matter of Dr. Hinshaw, whose daily briefings were must-see TV/social media viewing... holy crap, she got popular, and Jason's little fragile ego couldn't take that.
(As an aside, compare how long it took Alberta to catch up to other provinces in having a sign language interpreter present for these briefings. The government here couldn't give a crap about the disabled, including the deaf and blind communities)
So the politicians began to creep into Dr. Hinshaw's briefings. Tyler Shandro, the worst Health Minister we've ever had (he's a lawyer whose wife runs a private medical insurance business; guess what procedures he's been defunding so people will have to go to people like his wife so they can pay for these services and procedures), horned in one day and started reading some of the information Dr. Hinshaw would have, and finally said, "Now I'm going to allow Dr. Hinshaw to speak..."
Allow? ALLOW A REAL DOCTOR TO SPEAK?
But then this is the health minister who has zero respect for doctors. He can't take any criticism whatsoever (I'm blocked from posting on his FB page for daring to criticize him; cabinet ministers aren't supposed to block anyone), and his revenge for a doctor (a neighbor) criticizing him was to take his wife along, stand on the doctor's driveway, and scream at him in front of his wife and children. He claimed the doctor had threatened him (not true; Shandro was the one being threatening).
Later he intimidated a secretary into giving him the private email addresses and personal phone numbers of other doctors and proceeded to harass, intimidate, and threaten them, in one case threatening to take their children away.
Why this POS isn't in jail is beyond me. Kenney says he did nothing wrong. Shandro is a liar. The RCMP is still "investigating" the electoral fraud Kenney committed to become leader of the UCP (Kenney fired the Election Commissioner who was investigating this and found numerous instances of wrongdoing). But since Kenney wants to get rid of the RCMP in favor of a provincial police force, the RCMP are probably not investigating this very seriously.
And now Jason's fragile ego means he and Shandro have taken over the COVID briefings, Dr. Hinshaw gets to speak after the men do, and people have noticed that while she's still compassionate and calming, she's been thrown under the political bus on numerous occasions. Reporters ask her a question about school openings, business openings, the size of gatherings, and she says to ask the premier about that or whichever cabinet minister might be relevant - because they keep her out of the loop on many decisions now, and expect her to go along with whatever they say.
She had a sit-down session with Adriana LaGrange (my MLA, who is the Minister of Education), and it was supposed to be a bit of theatre in which Hinshaw would totally confirm LaGrange's plans to reopen the schools as being completely safe and (in Kenney's words) "if the teachers tidy up a bit" - aka sanitize the hell out of everything at the end of the day even though that's the janitors' jobs, not theirs - there would be no instances of COVID happening in the schools.
It was pathetic. LaGrange talks tough; she has a peculiar hatred of the public school system, the Calgary Board of Education in particular, and keeps saying she's going to fire all of them. But ask her anything about how the health of kids and teachers will be affected by this insane back-to-school "plan" and she usually refers the questions to Hinshaw. She could only repeat political platitudes and talking points and sneer at the NDP recommendations to have classes of only 15 kids to maintain social distancing.
Ah, social distancing in schools. LaGrange has been on vacation lately, and recently posted photos of herself and her grandchildren shopping for school supplies at the local Walmart (the one near my home). LaGrange herself was wearing a mask. The kids weren't. And on social media she's been whining that there's not enough time or money to hire the extra teachers that would be needed if class sizes were reduced to 15 (down from 30+), and she hasn't had the time to look into using other spaces (the UCP has fewer math skills than I do; I can understand that you cannot socially distance 30 kids in a regular classroom if they all have to stay 2m apart from each other; the rooms just aren't big enough).
There are office towers in Calgary empty of tenants since the downturn that happened before the pandemic. There are empty retail spaces in malls that could easily accommodate students. Yet LaGrange has had 5 months to investigate all this and whines that she hasn't had enough time.
And then people got stupid. Flocking to the beach at Sylvan Lake, or at other lakes, gathering in protests and prayer meetings... we had been patting ourselves on the back for "flattening the curve" but it's no longer flat. After the schools open, I plan to stay very far away from the kids in this building.
Speaking of which, the manager told me that a week ago there was a party of 40 crammed into the social room to celebrate a birthday.
40 PEOPLE!
We've been okay here so far, but I wish the company hadn't relaxed the rules about opening that room.
