What Danielle Smith Said...
aka the scandal of our time (this week)
Alberta’s new Premier Danielle Smith is in hot water. Here’s what she said:
The community that faced the most restrictions on their freedoms in the last year were those who made a choice not to be vaccinated. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a situation in my lifetime where a person was fired from their job or not allowed to watch their kids play hockey or not allowed to visit a loved one in long-term care or hospice, or not allowed to go on a plane to either go across the country to see family or even travel across the border. So they have been the most discriminated against group that I’ve ever witnessed in my lifetime. That’s a pretty extreme level of discrimination that we have seen.
I don’t take away any of the discrimination I’ve seen in any of those groups that you mention, but this has been an extraordinary time in the last year in particular and I want people to know that I find that unacceptable. We are not going to create a segregated society on the basis of a medical choice.
That, apparently, was enough to fuel outrage across mainstream and social media.
Here is one of the headlines (which seems to have since been deleted… at least I can’t find it)…
Conrad Nobert can’t remember anything more offensive from a Canadian official in his lifetime.
Really?
Spencer Fernando has a different perspective:
After new Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said unvaccinated people faced the most discrimination of any group she has seen in her lifetime, the opinion gatekeepers came out of the woodwork to denounce her remarks.
She was predictably attacked as a ‘racist’ and all the other insults the left loves to throw at people in an attempt to get them to back down.
The fact is, Danielle Smith is correct. It is abundantly clear that unvaccinated Canadians faced the most direct and relentless state-sponsored discrimination of any group in recent Canadian history.
Unvaccinated Canadians were banned from travel, often banned from workplaces, banned from seeing their families, and more. The politicians who imposed those policies knew they were wrong, as evidenced by Justin Trudeau previously speaking out against vaccine mandates before imposing them when he feared losing an election.
Here’s a sampling of some of the ways other’s interpreted her remarks…
I imagine she saw this coming… Here she is talking about hate speech in 2019.
I’ve been involved in conservative politics for a long, long time, and I remember all the way back when I was a kid, going to rallies, when Stockwell Day for example was leader at the federal level…and the outside protester’s chants were “racist, sexist, anti-gay, Stockwell Day, go away.”
It continues to be the mantra, I think, of people who don’t want to talk about their record. I think what we’re seeing is they take statements out of context that sound a little bit on the edge and then turn it into a full-blown scandal.
I guess the little bit on the edge part was the use of superlatives? Maybe Smith should have qualified discrimination against the unvaccinated as “the most government-endorsed, culturally accepted discrimination” she has witnessed in her lifetime.
I kind of wish she had said it that way. I’d be curious to see the tweets.
Meanwhile, according to True North, “A Danielle Smith government would amend the Alberta Human Rights Act to prohibit employers from firing employees based on their vaccination status.”
I really hope this happens. When it does, I wonder how that will be framed as a hate crime in Canada. Trudeau will probably find a way.
In the meantime, I’m thinking this…
We need a simple formula to add to any speech to "immunize" it from such leftist irrationality.
I read about Danielle Smith on another site last night. Very courageous of her. Made me feel the tide may have turned, at least in Alberta, based on all the comments on that other site. Sad to see the accusations of hate on some of the twitter pieces, hoping that's not representative.
Thanks for posting this!