Momentum Building: Saskatchewan and Alberta Announce End To Restrictions

It has been a bad week for the pro-mandate political establishment in Canada. After failing to smear and marginalize the convoy supporters and portray their views as “fringe” or “extreme” things have started popping loose on their own side of the debate.

Just today Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had one of his own Liberal MPs, Joël Lightbound, come out against the continuation of vaccine mandates, and slam his party’s divisive rhetoric against Canadians who disagree with the government’s COVID-19 policy. 

(Below is a video segment from a longer Twitter thread that documents Lightbound’s entire press conference.) 

The Conservative opposition in Parliament after ditching their former leader Erin O’Toole has found their backbone with their new interim leader Candice Bergen who has been leading the party directly against mandates and restrictions.

Now in another major step forward against the vaccine mandates and restrictions, the Premier of Saskatchewan Scott Moe has announced that his province will be scrapping the vaccine passport requirements at midnight on Sunday. 

In a press conference hosted by Moe, he explained that the restrictions were not necessary to keep Saskatchewan residents safe and that the programs have had a divisive effect on families and neighbours due to the stigmatization of people’s personal medical statuses. 

Provincial Saskatchewan mask mandates and other restrictions are also expected to be ending around the same date that the passport system ends. Certain restrictions may even be banned so that municipalities cannot try to enforce their own local versions.

Moe has been the most pliable of the premiers in Canada, and soon after the trucker convoy arrived in Ottawa on January 28 announced Saskatchewan would be looking to get rid of all provincial mandates, restrictions and passport requirements by the end of February. 

It is good to see followthrough occurring with Moe, which may help encourage other premiers to make the jump to truly getting back to normal. Alberta Premier Jason Kenney already seems to be following in Moe’s footsteps. 

Soon after Moe made his announcement Kenney called for a press conference for the evening to announce his “careful and prudent plan to lift damaging restrictions.”

Kenney includes the caveat that this will only happen as long as the pressure on hospitals continues to decline. Hospitalization seems unlikely to hinder normalization in Alberta as no matter how high cases of COVID spike across Canada, the hospitals have not experienced high rates of people being hospitalized for COVID-19, and that is taking into account that ICU bed numbers have been shown to be skewed artificially higher due to poor accounting practices. 

All of these shifts towards getting back to normal, and not a “new normal,” is putting a lot of pressure on the federal Liberals and their NDP and Bloc allies to fall into line and give the majority of Canadians what they want.

54 percent of Canadians, according to an Angus Reid poll, want all restrictions to be ended with only 40 percent not agreeing that it is time to lift restrictions.

The Liberals, NDP, and Bloc cannot win elections in the future all marketing the minority of COVID paranoid Canadians, which is a group that has been shrinking over time. At some point, they will have to give in to the demands of the convoy outside of Parliament simply for political survival. 

For now, Justin Trudeau seems like he will continue denying he represents the shrinking minority and will keep pitching the same plans Canadians have grown sick of as if he is making a coherent argument in the face of the growing global consensus and data showing government restrictions and mandates cannot stop the spread of the endemic virus.