They say "you can't fight City Hall" but of course you can & whether it's City Hall, the Alberta Legislature or Parliament Hill if the cause is right, your strategy is solid and your numbers are good, YOU'LL ACTUALLY WIN EVERY TIME.
That's right, I said it: you'll actually win every time. That's Science. /2 bbc.com/future/article…
Yesterday some of us were hearing rumblings. Maybe an emergency cabinet session amongst Kenney & his henchmen & henchwomen (henchpeople?). If they were meeting they were meeting over Covid. They *had* to be /3
The pressure, coming from all sides, had to be enormous. From day one medical professionals & thought-leaders the world over as well as Alberta's general public were aghast at what Kenney's "Conservatives" were proposing: a full-fledged #CovidSurrender /4
Late Thursday aft the rumblings gained solidity. What we'd heard was true. Those of us who'd been unconsciously humming the theme song to 'Rocky" that day turned up the volume a little bit. Their purely ideological policy had more than a wobble to it. /7 edmonton.ctvnews.ca/mobile/alberta…
Another story rolled in early evening reinforcing the previous one & announcing @CMOH_Alberta Deena Hinshaw herself would be attending a morning press conference with fellow monstrous policy henchperson @AdrianaLaGrange. #ableg was abuzz. This was it. /8 cbc.ca/news/canada/ca…
Would another shoe drop that night or would we have to wait for the morning presser to hear for our own ears what our hearts already knew: they couldn't sustain it. The pressure'd finally gotten to them. The pressure #WeThePeople played no small role in creating & maintaining /9
Some of us made silent wagers with ourselves about whether the Cowards Jason Kenney @jkenney and/or @shandro would "man up" to support these women they'd been hiding behind to be the faces of the very worst of their policies. Of course they wouldn't /10
You almost never lose money betting on cowards doing the cowardly thing. Surely they had not-so-cheap whiskey that needed drinking at that hour. Gods know that's what I'd be doing if I had anything to do with this ludicrous goat-rodeo policy failure /11
The morning presser was surprisingly on time-ish. #TestTraceIsolate, our clarion call for sanity in Alberta's covid response, in fact having any response whatsoever other than outright retreat & denial, was on the table. This is what victory looks like /12
Yes we can say "it's just 6 weeks" but Sept 27th's an eternity for a jurisdiction like Alberta already well into our steep #FourthWave#DeltaVariant incline & though we'll surely need to keep up the pressure, Kenney ditching testing/tracing in late September Just. Won't. Fly. /13
It's one thing to say you'll stop testing in early summer when you can make the (false) argument that the vaccine has rendered Covid's threat to Alberta negligible & quite another when all & sundry can see we're well into our 4th Wave. It. Won't. Fly. /14
Don't forget: this was how Kenney's highly paid henchpeople, like the manifestly execrable & utterly reckless @MattWolfAB, was selling this policy back in the day. In a #DeltaVariant infused September & the numbers in front of us, I assure you That. Dog. Don't. Hunt. /15
Throw into that mix a federal election where deeply flawed "Conservative" leader @erinotoole has to convince Canadians that somehow his party would've done better at managing the Covid threat (it would've been disastrous) as Kenney utterly abandons Alberta to it MID 4TH WAVE. /16
This whole play was to bury the numbers from their disastrous choice to hold an @calgarystampede that only Kenney & its board members wanted. The gambit failed. Our victory is total. We build on what we did here and remain vigilant for whatever's next. /17
These are the days of #SmokeAndCovid. You've just pushed back your government's attempt at a policy they know full well would make sick/kill a great number of Albertans & stood up to proto-Fascism's knucklehead foot soldiers. Take heart. Your next #HeatWave is here. /20
"What's that about the 'foot soldiers of #ProtoFascism,'" you say? Well you can't cover Alberta's historic #EnoughIsEnough protests without at least a mention, even if it will only encourage them, of the antimasker/vaccine/Covid isn't real/science doesn't matter knuckleheads /21
Hinshaw announced the disastrous plan July 28th. By the 30th the noon rallies began, running 15 days straight, long weekends be damned. With us also from day 1 were our counter-protestors & their systematic & not unsuccessful brute force assault against our #FreeSpeech /22
These thugs, creeps & cowards with multiple megaphones & sound systems weren't there to 'compete in the marketplace of ideas.' They weren't even listening to each other. The goal was cacophony, mayhem & fear. They groped. Spat. Shouted down children. /23
At peak the #EnoughIsEnough rallies attracted just over 600 attendees on Aug 3rd. Numbers only shrunk from there as proto-Fascist tactics took a toll. It became no place for families, especially kids & it's said the Mayor himself wouldn't attend for safety reasons. In Calgary /24
These are History's knuckleheads. They are the ideological clones of America's #Jan6th insurrectionists & the Mad (former) King Trump's bastard stepchildren. The Covid Deniers aren't owned by Kenney, quite the contrary: Kenney fears them & them alone. /25
As we wait for @CMOH_Alberta to release the data behind this abysmally reckless policy, I'm still waiting for #yyccc to explain what data they relied on for lifting the #MaskMandate. Other than woefully misguided ideas about how money works during a pandemic, it's this:
/26
My warning to #yyccc & @CalgaryPolice as it relates to these protests is this is the endgame History's knuckleheads have always wanted and it's every bit as possible in #YYC as it is anywhere else. We ignore their escalation at our peril, I promise you /27
To the Covid Denier knuckleheads themselves, I'll say only this: If during a pandemic you're #antimask, anti lockdown *AND* #AntiVaccine? You're nothing but a reckless, stinky infant with no solutions. Nobody, anywhere, should listen to you for any reason.
But enough about them. The one thing I haven't called them yet is what History just now proved them to be once again, as it always has: losers. And they deserve not one second more of my time or yours. /30 calgaryherald.com/news/local-new…
Though the ground war stalled, the #EnoughIsEnough air war was going strong, gathering steam, piping ever more pressure into the halls of Alberta power. Between that & the horrific yet eminently predictable rise in Covid cases the policy died ignominiously on Friday the 13th. /31
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Bird Site Migrant Angst vs The Latest on Emergencies Act Inquiry 🧵 #EAInquiry#cdnpoli
Wrote 100 post thread on this here #BirdSite about everything that'd NOT be covered by the #EmergenciesActInquiry & how we'll need a #Jan6thInquiry that digs into ALL OF IT, not just whether Trudeau was justified (because OF COURSE he was). /2
Lots worth adding today but I'm feeling the weight of being here. Building here. When every day it feels increasingly like things are DESIGNED to chase me and people that think like me outta here to somewhere else. It's gross these days. Getting grosser /3 #mastodonmigration
I've taken this to heart ever since I saw it on a friend's wall some years ago. I think you could say the same thing about the pushback on "#woke" by genuinely bad people who'd rather we all just stayed asleep so they can make their gobs of money off a clearly broken status quo.
So I wrote a 100+ tweet 🧵on the great many & ever-growing failings rendering "Conservative" leader Poilievre unelectable as Prime Minister but it got mangled at the end. Given the 3x weekly proto-fascistic bozo eruptions of this man & his enablers, this 2nd 🧵was needed. Mahalo!
I was recently #BlockedByDanielleSmith but it doesn't matter because her political career is effectively over after this next election. A "Conservative" that can't win in #YYC can't win the province. Just too damned extreme for the business class. #abpoli
Bitcoin champion, convoy enthusiast and walking climate disaster Pierre Poilievre is officially the new leader of the "Conservative" Party of Canada. I'm told I should be *very* afraid he'll become the Prime Minster. I'm not. I don't think he has a hope in hell 🧵#cdnpoli
People have short memories and the (ongoing) pandemic feels like a lifetime ago which is why Canadians may need reminding what "Conservative" leadership would have looked like during that time had Polly been PM. No CERB. No nothing. You're on your own. /2
Might as well nip this in the bud: I'm not AT ALL advising anybody "let their guard down". I think this generation of "Conservatives" need the electoral reckoning of their entire existence so all future generations know not to float this extremist garbage at Canadians. /3
"All politicians are the same," they mooed lazily, chewing their collective cud in a field now openly ablaze. "There's no difference between political parties, *everybody* knows that!" /2 #cdnpoli