
“Damned if you do and damned if you don’t.”
“Caught between a rock and a hard place.”
There’s no shortage of well-worn clichés to describe the predicament in which Premier Jason Kenney finds himself as Alberta’s COVID numbers skyrocket, filling hospital beds and stuffing intensive care units.
A tsunami of medical misery threatens to crash over Albertans, and the premier’s options to mitigate the coming catastrophe range from crappy to crappier. I (almost) felt sorry for him yesterday evening as he plowed through a press conference announcing a suite of additional restrictions on Albertans’ freedoms — restrictions antithetical to his political soul.
After his presser, predictably, a storm of criticism erupted from all sides: from those who felt that he went too far, to those who felt he didn’t go nearly far enough; from those upset that he didn’t shut down all non-essential businesses and close all the schools (he sent grades 7–12 home), to those angered by further constraints to their lives.