Alberta
IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, READ THIS! Alberta’s COVID-19 Report
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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
‘Coutts Two’ Verdict: Bail and Mischief
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Protesters demonstrating against COVID-19 mandates and restrictions gather as a truck convoy blocks the highway at the Canada-U.S. border crossing in Coutts, Alta., on Feb. 2, 2022. The Canadian Press/Jeff McIntosh
From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
By Ray McGinnis
Imagine spending over two years behind bars, only to be told the evidence never supported the charges against you.
On Aug. 2, a Lethbridge jury found Chris Carbert and Tony Olienick not guilty of the most serious charge of conspiracy to commit murder of police officers. However, though they were declared innocent, the conspiracy charge was the basis for their being held in remand for at least 925 days. They were denied bail based on this charge.
The sentencing hearing for other charges against Carbert and Olienick is taking place this week.
Granting Bail Typical for Serious Offences
In Canada, when someone is charged with committing a crime, they’re released on bail. This includes those charged with murder. For example, in September 2021, 31-year-old Umar Zameer was released on bail after being charged with the first-degree murder of Toronto Police Constable Jeffrey Northrup.
A case of double murder in the city of Mission in B.C.’s Fraser Valley concerned the deaths of Lisa Dudley and her boyfriend Guthrie McKay. Tom Holden, accused of first-degree murder in the case, was released on bail.
Conditions for not Granting Bail
Why do we release people from custody after being charged with a crime? Why don’t we hold people indefinitely? It’s been a Canadian tradition that there’s a process in place to which we adhere. Does the person charged with a crime seem to present a risk of repeating an offence? Carbert and Olienick hadn’t previously committed the offence(s) they were charged with. They didn’t have any criminal records for any violence. So, the likelihood of repetition of offence didn’t apply.
Another reason for denying bail is flight risk. But the Crown agreed neither of these men posed a flight risk. If you’re not clear about the identity of the person you’ve arrested, you can hold them in custody. But the Crown and the RCMP were certain of the identity of these men.
How about denying bail for evidence protection? If let go, was it possible the Crown or RCMP would lose evidence, and they needed to keep Carbert and Olienick in remand? No.
Were Carbert or Olienick considered a danger to the public? No. They had no past history of committing violent crimes, so in the case of the Coutts Two this was not a reason to deny bail.
The Crown insisted the pair be denied bail because their release would undermine confidence in the judicial system. Due to the seriousness of the offences the pair were charged with, releasing them would put the legal system into disrepute. But this is a circular argument. In authoritarian countries, police may arrest citizens on serious charges they’re not guilty of and leave them in prison indefinitely.
Granting Bail Goes Back to Magna Carta
Since the Magna Carta was signed in 1215, western judicial institutions have allowed those charged with a crime to be presumed innocent until proven guilty. With that provision comes the right to bail and a speedy trial. When citizens are accused of a crime and left to rot in prison without having their day in court, their spirits can be broken and persuaded to agree to plead guilty even when they are innocent.
Unindicted Co-conspirators Never Interviewed
During the trial, the Crown repeatedly named a list of unindicted co-conspirators. Each had a licence to carry a weapon in public for years. None of them were ever searched. None of them were ever interviewed. None of the alleged co-conspirators received any communication from the RCMP, or other authorities, about their possible connection to a conspiracy to murder police officers. However, the list of names provided for some legal theatre in the court added to the ominous scale of the supposed conspiracy to murder police officers.
Intelligence
Former career police officer Vincent Gircys had standing in the Justice Mosley decision. The judge ruled in January 2024 that the government’s invocation of the Emergencies Act in February 2022 to end the convoy protests was unconstitutional.
After the Coutts Two verdict, Gircys was concerned about the intelligence. There was a disconnect between the conspiracy charge and the evidence the Crown brought to trial. Gircys stated, “It’s really important to find where that disconnect is. Because of faulty intelligence? False intelligence? Fabricated intelligence? The evidence that they (RCMP) do have would all be logged, gathered, and time-lined. And that goes to what evidence was not gathered? … How could that information have been laid in the first place? How could the Crown have proceeded with this case to begin with?”
The Coutts Two were found not guilty of conspiracy to commit murder. But by the time they are sentenced on the other charges this week, they will have spent at least 925 days in custody. What does this mean for innocent until proven guilty?
Ray McGinnis is a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. His forthcoming book is “Unjustified: The Emergencies Act and the Inquiry that Got It Wrong.”
Agriculture
P&H Group building $241-million flour milling facility in Red Deer County.
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P&H Milling Group has qualified for the Agri-Processing Investment Tax Credit program
Alberta’s food processing sector is the second-largest manufacturing industry in the province and the flour milling industry plays an important role within the sector, generating millions in annual economic impact and creating thousands of jobs. As Canada’s population continues to increase, demand for high-quality wheat flour products is expected to rise. With Alberta farmers growing about one-third of Canada’s wheat crops, the province is well-positioned to help meet this demand.
Alberta’s Agri-Processing Investment Tax Credit program is supporting this growing sector by helping to attract a new wheat flour milling business to Red Deer County. P&H Milling Group, a division of Parrish & Heimbecker, Limited, is constructing a $241-million facility in the hamlet of Springbrook to mill about 750 metric tonnes of wheat from western Canadian farmers into flour, every single day. The new facility will complement the company’s wheat and durum milling operation in Lethbridge.
“P&H Milling Group’s new flour mill project is proof our Agri-Processing Investment Tax Credit program is doing its job to attract large-scale investments in value-added agricultural manufacturing. With incentives like the ag tax credit, we’re providing the right conditions for processors to invest in Alberta, expand their business and help stimulate our economy.”
P&H Milling Group’s project is expected to create about 27 permanent and 200 temporary jobs. Byproducts from the milling process will be sold to the livestock feed industry across Canada to create products for cattle, poultry, swine, bison, goats and fish. The new facility will also have capacity to add two more flour mills as demand for product increases in the future.
“This new facility not only strengthens our position in the Canadian milling industry, but also boostsAlberta’s baking industry by supplying high-quality flour to a diverse range of customers. We are proud to contribute to the local economy and support the agricultural community by sourcing 230,000 metric tonnes of locally grown wheat each year.”
To be considered for the tax credit program, corporations must invest at least $10 million in a project to build or expand a value-added agri-processing facility in Alberta. The program offers a 12 per cent non-refundable tax credit based on eligible capital expenditures. Through this program, Alberta’s government has granted P&H Milling Group conditional approval for a tax credit estimated at $27.3 million.
“We are grateful P&H Milling Group chose to build here in Red Deer County. This partnership willbolster our local economy and showcase our prime centralized location in Alberta, an advantage that facilitates efficient operations and distribution.”
Quick facts
- In 2023, Alberta’s food processing sector generated $24.3 billion in sales, making it the province’s second-largest manufacturing industry, behind petroleum and coal.
- That same year, just over three million metric tonnes of milled wheat and more than 2.3 million metric tonnes of wheat flour was manufactured in Canada.
- Alberta’s milled wheat and meslin flour exports increased from $8.6 million in 2019 to $19.8 million in 2023, a 130.2 per cent increase.
- Demand for flour products rose in Alberta from 2019 to 2022, with retail sales increasing by 24 per cent during that period.
- Alberta’s flour milling industry generated about $840.7 million in economic impact and created more than 2,200 jobs on average between 2018 and 2021.
- Alberta farmers produced 9.3 million metric tonnes of wheat in 2023, representing 29.2 per cent of total Canadian production.
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