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What Jason Kenney's 'mission accomplished' moment has reaped for Alberta
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Candidate
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| Contributor | IndyGeorgia |
| Last Edited | IndyGeorgia Sep 15, 2021 09:15pm |
| Category | Opinion |
| News Date | Sep 15, 2021 12:00pm |
| Description | It’s not only the near-total abandonment of public health precautions that has embittered much of Alberta toward its premier, though the outcome of Jason Kenney’s decision led to an unfettered fourth wave, and unleashed the Delta variant with the effect of record-busting pressure on ICUs and the postponement of hundreds of surgeries.
The thing that more profoundly enrages folks in Edmonton, Calgary and elsewhere in the province is the brazen certainty with which he unilaterally lowered Alberta’s defences against COVID. He declared a newly liberated public would enjoy the “best summer ever”—his party sold ballcaps with that slogan—and was fond of adding that Alberta was not just open for summer, but “open for good.” A senior aide boasted to doubters on Twitter: “The pandemic is ending. Accept it.”
It’s as though Kenney felt he had outwitted the coronavirus, conquering it in a way no other political mind was able or willing to do.
Worse than ringing hollow to a provincial hospital network teetering on the brink of disaster, Kenney’s slogans will live on as reminders of his folly, and his astonishingly hubristic miscalculation. He’s like former U.S. president George W. Bush, posing in 2003 on that aircraft carrier with a “Mission Accomplished” banner behind him, three weeks after troops seized Baghdad from Saddam Hussein. The American casualty toll in the Iraq war grew more than fortyfold after that flourish of bravado. |
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