Front Burner - Virus rages in 'precarious' Alberta

Episode Date: November 24, 2020

In the first wave of the pandemic, Alberta was one of the provinces that seemed to have things relatively under control. Now, the province has daily case rates three times as high as Quebec or Ontario, and ICUs in Calgary and Edmonton have been hitting 90 per cent capacity. But Premier Jason Kenney hasn't addressed the province at a COVID-19 briefing for almost two weeks, and has resisted repeated calls for lockdowns from doctors and other experts. It's leading some Albertans to tweet the hashtag #WhereIsKenney. Today, Jason Markusoff of Maclean's Magazine joins us to talk about how Alberta got here, and what happens now.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson. Right now, there are more active cases of COVID-19 in Alberta than anywhere else in the country. ICUs in Calgary and Edmonton have also been hitting 90% capacity. It's clear that we have reached a precarious point in Alberta. To put it as plainly as possible,

this is like a snowball rolling down a hill, growing bigger and faster. And lately, the rate of new cases per capita has been about three times as high as in Ontario or Quebec. Right now, both those provinces have imposed their most severe lockdowns and hot zones since the spring. More than 70 Alberta emergency room and intensive care physicians sent a letter to the Alberta government Monday. If we don't do something, we will see refrigerator trucks in the front of our hospitals.

But in Alberta, Premier Jason Kenney hasn't addressed the province at a COVID-19 briefing for almost two weeks now. And experts are angry that the Premier has resisted the repeated calls for a lockdown. On Twitter, this hashtag has taken off. Where is Kenny? Today, I'm speaking with Jason Markosoff, an associate editor at Maclean's Magazine based in Calgary and a good friend of the pod, about how Alberta got here and what happens now. This is Frontburner. Hi, Jason. It's so great to have you back on. Thanks so much for coming. Hi there.

So Alberta is certainly not alone here in getting caught by the second wave, but it's particularly bad there. Can you paint me a picture of how bad things are in the province right now? Alberta didn't have it as bad as Ontario or Quebec in the first wave, but we had our difficulties. We had the largest outbreak in Canada at some slaughterhouses. This video from inside the Cargill meat processing plant in High River, Alberta. Nearly half of them, 936, have contracted the coronavirus. One person has died. We did have a good amount of death, more than some of the other provinces out west. But at the peak of things in the spring, we had 3,000 COVID cases active. As of Monday, we have 13,000 active COVID cases.

The province has basically admitted complete system failure on contact tracing. The team has not been able to keep up with the current demand. This means that there has been a slowly growing backlog of cases over the past several weeks. So much so that Dr. Dina Henshaw, the Chief Medical Officer of Health, announced today that they're so backlogged that they want people to know that if 10 days have passed since their COVID positive test, they won't get a case investigation call. So stop expecting one. Things are that backed up. Instead, these individuals will receive a text message that will notify them to not expect a call

and to provide them on guidance on if and when their isolation period has ended. They have had to shorten the isolation period for health professionals who have tested positive. They are having to implement surge protocols at hospitals, cancel surgeries like they did in the spring to keep up with capacity, especially in the city of Edmonton, whose hospitals are full to bursting with ICU cases and COVID cases. And the toll of deaths has just been really extreme lately. We now have 476 dead. Last month, this time, it was about 300. And in the last week, this really hits home for those of us who realize that it's not just older people who are dying. In the last week, there were three people younger than 40 who passed away

because of COVID-19. Speaking of those deaths, there is this photo that's been circulating of this doctor in Calgary on his knees in the hospital. And he's calling a family to tell them that their loved one has died. And he just looks devastated. And he looks exhausted. He looks so tired. And it seems like that picture has now become quite emblematic of the situation in the province right now, hey? Absolutely. That photo hit me like a ton of bricks, and I think it hit a lot of people that way in Alberta and elsewhere. A fact actually made that photo even starker and sadder, and it's that that ICU doctor in Calgary, when he was shown that photo, couldn't remember in what case it was taken because he's

had to make those terrible calls so often. And he's so exhausted from having to do that. I think phone calls like this usually happen weekly, right? And the people that are in the ICU are the sickest people in the hospital. Although we don't want this to happen, it's part of almost a routine. And that is the toll this is taking on our families, our health care workers, and everybody in this province. You mentioned before that, you know, during the first wave, things weren't so bad in Alberta. Can you walk me through how it is that things got to where they are today? I mean, you mentioned sort of a failure of contact tracing. Jason Kinney has repeatedly touted the provincial contact tracing app,

but according to the province, it's only been used to track down people who came into contact with someone who tested positive with COVID in approximately 20 cases. 20, you heard me correct. But what else are we talking about here? So much of it seems to have been two major factors. One is that people let up their guard. We went through shutdowns of business, schools being closed, life being totally disrupted in the spring. Our provincial leaders, certainly in Alberta,

were very proud to reopen things and boast about freedom. And Alberta has done extremely well on a global scale by taking a lighter approach to restrictions than many other jurisdictions that had vast lockdowns and aggressive enforcement and micromanaging people's lives. Many of those jurisdictions have seen much higher levels of infections and fatalities. And people were going back to their regular lives. They were having parties again.

They were going out again with their friends. So that happened. And the second thing that happened was that, despite the fact that we knew that a second wave in the fall when things got colder was very very likely uh it doesn't appear that our provincial leadership really acted with that in mind and tried to uh put the squeeze down on our uh on our goings out and our interactions um before then because of this balance that so many leaders, more so in Alberta than perhaps elsewhere,

had desire that they had to balance the economy and the pandemic, as they say. As I've said from day one of the pandemic, our responses always need to be equally dedicated to protecting both lives and livelihoods. I want to talk about Jason Kenney. What has he been like as a leader? What have we heard from Kenney? In the last few weeks and the months as we've had this rapidly increasing COVID curve, we haven't heard much. He's often talked about wanting to be laser focused on the economy in Alberta. We have to get Alberta working again, restore the jobs that have been lost,

and revive the businesses that are barely hanging on. And with some good reason. Alberta's economy has taken a harder hit than any other in the country during this pandemic, in large part because the pandemic came alongside a major crash in oil prices and crash in oil production. So there is a huge demand for leadership to help out with diversifying the economy, supporting the oil sector, just helping people in really bad economic straits. But to focus so much on that, you know, and take your eye off this global pandemic, this very short, sharp, brutal crisis that Alberta is facing has made things worse.

He's talked incessantly about Alberta's personal responsibility, boasting that we have the freest province right now. We've seen other jurisdictions implement sweeping lockdowns, indiscriminately violating people's rights and destroying livelihoods. Nobody wants that to happen here in Alberta. At a time when that message seems to be helping confuse people as to what they should or shouldn't do. We, you know, we're the last province to have no province-wide mandatory mask mandate, although mayors in Calgary and Edmonton have put them in, um, that we can still eat at bars and restaurants. Um, they've had some, uh, some shutdowns. Some of them have been voluntary and some of them have been, uh, mandatory, but, uh, it's nowhere near the levels, uh,

he imposed in the spring. Right. And this idea of focusing on personal responsibility, has the province given people any guidance on what that means? It's mixed. The messaging has not been very clear. They often talk about what you should stay within a certain cohort. You have your work cohort, you have your child's school or daycare cohort, you may have a sport cohort. Remember that a cohort is a group of people who don't have to follow all COVID restrictions at all times to enable an activity such as team sport to take place. This is not the case in most workplaces. I don't think that people have a real clear sense on what that means, as opposed to other provinces

where they've talked about, you know, one or two other households in your bubble. People, you know, mix that in with fatigue, the confused messaging, and it's a recipe for people to gather at restaurants, have parties in their apartments or houses, you know, generally violate the good precepts of what pandemic safety is. And, you know, the other thing that's on the other side of that is that this personal

responsibility that Jason Kenney has comes with a lack of enforcement. There are no bodies enforcing these. He's just saying he trusts Albertans. We are focused on the health of the broader health, physical, mental, social, and economic. And that's why our focus as much as possible continue to be on encouraging people to exercise responsibility. And I think that we're seeing the failure of that philosophy show up in our extreme COVID results lately. results lately. Can you compare him to other leaders around the country for me? Maybe, I don't know, Doug Ford in Ontario. It's been really interesting watching Doug Ford and Jason Kenney in this because I think of all, I mean, there are quite a good number of provincial premiers who are conservative, come from conservative parties.

But those two seem to be the most conservative ideologically. They've been quite different. We don't hear the same appeals to personal responsibility or the same disdain for lockdowns from Doug Ford. In fact, we've seen him act quite assertively eventually. Our modeling showed that if nothing was done, we could face 6,000 new daily cases in the coming weeks. Effective Monday, November 23rd at 12.01am, Toronto and Peel will be moved into lockdown. People say it was too late in Ontario,

but he has acted at much lower levels of spread than Alberta has. Alberta has much higher rates now. And Jason Kenney's reluctance to act has been much greater than that of Doug Ford. Not only that, but also his tone is different. And I think the tone matters so much in terms of public health messaging, especially when we know that conservative politicians will reach a certain type of person that might not be listening to the daily briefings from the public officers of health. Right. Can you give me an example of that? So an example is, you know, a few times a week we hear Dr. Dina Hinshaw,

the Chief Medical Officer of Health, doing her news conference and her news update. Last Monday, we announced 860 new cases. On Sunday, less than a week later, we announced 1,584. She has a huge following of people who really, you know, hang on her every word, listen to her on a regular basis. That's not everybody in this province. And that's going to skew more urban. Jason Kenney's political base skews more rural, more conservative, Um, Jason Kenney's, uh, political base skews more rural, more conservative people who are less likely to want to, uh, do less, um, in terms of economic activities or social activities to keep themselves and others safe.

Um, there's a certain value when Jason Kenney gets up there and talks, um, and he's done it a few times, but not much. He, uh, seems to much prefer to talk about the, the economy, job activities and, uh, defending the oil sector. These are the things that play much more in his wheelhouse than using the heavy hand of government to restrict people's liberties. It's a good thing that he wasn't using that kind of personal responsibility rhetoric and libertarian rhetoric during the start of this pandemic. Otherwise, we might have had as severe a first wave as Quebec or as some of the US states or elsewhere. Why do you think he switched his tone moving into the second wave? And I know you sort of alluded to this earlier, but I'd just be

interested to hear your thoughts on why you think this switch happened. Part of it is the economic situation in Alberta. I mean, Albertans are still affluent, we still make a lot of money in oil, the average wage is still higher than elsewhere. But the decline has gone so fast in Alberta that it is really at a dire level that politicians do, no matter of any stripe, would need to respond in a much higher rate than they might elsewhere. need to respond in a much higher rate than they might elsewhere. And he's admitted that he has his own ideological perspective on this. You know, he believes in personal freedom, he believes in liberties. He's enjoyed, you know, saying Alberta is open for businesses, the freest province. What you describe as a lockdown, first of all, constitutes a massive invasion of people, the exercise of people's fundamental rights, and a massive impact on

their, not only their personal liberties, but their ability to put food on the table. The other part is who's going to be in his ear. He's a conservative politician, and his caucus and cabinet skew more rural than the rest of the province. And the people he's listening to will skew more pro-business. It was really instructive to hear him a few weeks ago. He was doing an online presentation or speech to the Rural Municipalities of Alberta, a group of rural councillors. And there he really had to stress that,

look, guys, COVID is serious. You might not see it in all your small communities but it's a very serious risk you need to make sure people are obeying public health risks you social distancing wearing masks when they're too close. We have seen significant spread in various times over the over the past nine months in rural communities and we we have, I think, seen in some communities a skepticism, in some rural communities, a skepticism about the danger that COVID poses. So that signals to me that he's hearing from a lot of people that there is outright skepticism of even having rules or having life changed from COVID. So he's hearing that much more than people will hear, say,

in Calgary or Edmonton. And that seems to be coloring his policy response that is much slower than that of almost any leader, other leader in the country. Well, it's interesting to hear you say that. I mean, certainly there have been these, what look like sizable protests of people who are, you know, protesting for greater freedoms, of people who are protesting for greater freedoms. They don't want lockdowns. But his approval ratings are also in the toilet, right? Like he is the worst rated leader in the country on his pandemic response from his own people

by a pretty wide margin, according to a recent Leger poll. And so how do you explain that? Those are still pretty marginal groups. I walk around Calgary, goer poll. And so how do you explain that? Those are still pretty marginal groups. You know, I walk around Calgary, go to stores, um, people are wearing masks. Um, there are the occasional person squawking about, you know, not wanting to wear masks and posting that on Facebook and that get a lot of attention just like these protests will, but that's still a minority as it is in Toronto when you see images of protests. In terms of his popularity,

it speaks to that urban consensus that has been building that Alberta needs to do more on COVID, that this appeal to personal responsibility and appeal to prioritizing the economy over public health is failing. And that layers on top of other things that he's done to irritate the public. Some various budget cuts that he's undertaken, the huge war he's had with public health workers during this pandemic over contracts with the doctors, with the nurses, with several of the unions. Alberta UCP government plans to cut up to 11,000 jobs in health services. At least 800 health care workers have walked off the job in Alberta. There's a lot of frustration with how Kenny is leading or not leading this province right now.

And certainly that's reflecting in what he's in the popularity numbers. Right. It's not just his COVID response, though. His COVID response is certainly part of numbers. Right. It's not just his COVID response, though his COVID response is certainly part of it. Jason, I'm interested to hear your perspective here. We've seen a similar pattern in all three prairie provinces, Saskatchewan and Manitoba as well. Manitoba in particular, first waves were quite light and then a very severe second wave. And why do you think all three provinces seem to follow the same trajectory here? Is there some of the same stuff going on? They all had pretty light first waves,

as you've said. And they're all conservative, and they've all been reluctant to reimpose further restrictions. I think that Pallister tends to be the most moderate one, the Premier Manitoba. And we've seen they had the sharpest rise in the last several weeks and months. And their hospitals have the most strain right now of any of the prairie provinces. So they have enacted the toughest lockdowns in the country. Now COVID is beating us. We need to get back to the fundamentals. We need to flatten our COVID curve.

And we need to do that now. With some reluctance and not as fast as the chief medical officer of health there seems to have wanted to move. Whereas in Saskatchewan and Alberta, those two premiers who seem to be quite buddy-buddy and quite attentive to what the other one does, they've been the slowest to act in the country. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here.

You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income. That's not a typo. 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. Looping back to Alberta and Jason Kenney here, you painted this picture for me

today of a politician who is concerned, you know, rightly so, about the economy, this particular battering that Alberta has gotten because of COVID. He's ideological himself, right? He is a proponent of sort of individual responsibility. He doesn't want to alienate parts of his party. Some of this is happening in other provinces nearby as well. But, you know, we're talking to you on Monday afternoon. And my understanding is there is an emergency cabinet meeting today. And is there any indication here of what could come out of that? is there any indication here of what could come out of that? You know, I'm thinking of Dr. Dina Hinshaw, the public health official in Alberta talking today about how this is like a snowball

rolling down a hill, and it will continue unless we implement strong measures to stop. We must take action. And do you think that things are going to move here in Alberta? It's been a snowball rolling down a hill for several weeks now, and that's been plain to everybody, including some of the things that Dr. Hinshaw has said. But she said for the first time today that she's bringing in new recommendations for action. A subcommittee of cabinet, kind of this elite group of eight members, including the Premier, will be discussing these today. And I would be shocked if there wasn't some kind of action to further restrict people's activities in the name of public health tomorrow. Not only does the situation, the public health situation call on that, but the public is too. We did get some additional polling today showing that clear majorities of the province would be in favour of a full mask mandate, some tough enforcement of COVID restrictions, even what they call a circuit breaker lockdown. This thing that several dozen public health doctors and some other local officials around Alberta have talked about to help us get this very sharp rising curve down.

A burial ground of some bottled up feelings placed very prominently outside the health minister's constituency office. The mock tombstones are depicting death tolls. It's seemingly an attempt to get attention by elected officials who are being accused of their absence. We'll see what Jason Kenney is going to do, but it's clear that the public and the situation are pleading for some action, and I expect we'll see something. It's a matter of how much he's willing to do. Okay, Jason, thank you so much for this conversation, and we hope to have you back on real soon. It's always great talking to you, Jamie. all right so just before we go today a little bit of news saskatchewan's premier scott moe is now in isolation after a potential exposure to someone with COVID-19.

That's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening and talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.