I turned on the news last night and Alberta Premier Jason Kenney was announcing he was resigning.
I was surprised but not unhappy. Obviously, a lot of people in his caucus were not unhappy either.
A leader needs a lot more a little over 50 per cent to lead effectively. I think that he never did lead effectively. He was focused on oil and gutting the healthcare system. He would have gotten a lot further if it wasn’t for COVID. Which he handled badly, too.
He couldn’t say anything about masks without reminding people about their rights. People died because of that.
People tend to take their cues from their leaders at such times and he just mucked it up. He was caught not wearing a mask several times, even when the pandemic was in full swing.
We are now getting hit by inflation. This is also on the shoulders of people who refused the guidelines. The infection romped around the province and still is. People did not want to wear a mask and figured if they voted on it they could or couldn’t follow the guidelines.
Science is not a democracy and you can’t just vote and make everything OK. COVID doesn’t care.
There also is no guarantee that just because you feel you are superior and won’t get it doesn’t mean COVID feels the same way.
Kenney outlined all the wonderful things his government had done and mentioned school choice. Sorry, I just don’t agree with that one. An education system has to have standards that have to be upheld if you want your child’s education to mean something. When you drill down on school choice it gets messy with corruption, and lack of standards.
There are great ways to get the Alberta economy stabilized and that is to not be so dependent on boom and bust of oil. I have nothing against oil having a long list of relatives who make their living out there. Instead of shipping the unrefined product out of the province we should build a refinery of our own.
Would you rather have 30 guys looking at dials between here and Corpus Christi or a couple of thousand working at a refinery?
Eva Sartorius,
High Prairie