Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others (The Alberta Edition)

 In KenneyLand (aka Alaberta or Bertabama), it seems that there are two sets of rules at play.  

First, let me introduce you to the saga of GraceLife Church in Parkland County.  This organization has been holding services and ignoring public health orders since Fall of 2020.  The province has seemingly been unwilling to do anything about it until recently - in fact, it took until just after Easter (we'll come back to this point in a moment) for concrete steps to be taken.  Steps that the government had to take if they were going to enforce anything with a rising third wave of the pandemic. 

48 Hrs In Alberta Politics

 The last couple of days in Alberta have been interesting ... not good, but interesting.  

It all starts with a bunch of rural UCP MLAs putting out a joint letter complaining loudly about the return to a much stricter set of restrictions to control the spread of COVID-19. 

In public, Kenney tried to paper this over as "legitimate debate", saying that his party supports differences of opinion.  Then there's what happened behind closed doors.  Not only did Kenney threaten to call a snap election in caucus, but he also threatened to boot out MLAs who violated public health orders - a non-subtle reference to the Christmas travel scandal a few months ago. 

All of this paints a very interesting political picture.

The Vaccination Rollout In Canada Is Being Botched - Deliberately

As a third wave of COVID is about to clobber Canada, I want to talk a bit about why this is completely unnecessary, and likely as not has more to do with politics than it does anything else. 

Since Canada has no capacity of its own to produce vaccines, especially not something as sophisticated as the Pfizer mRNA vaccine, the Federal Government took the step of over-procuring - basically signing contracts for far more than we actually need with multiple vendors, and hoping that enough would come in from each of them to be useful.  More or less, that plan has worked out fairly well.  There have been hiccups resulting from production capacity problems in Europe, and more recently some squawking from European states over exports, but nothing insurmountable. 

The point being that vaccines are here, and they are being distributed to the provinces. 

So, why is it being so painfully slow to get vaccines into people's arms?