Thread by @BarbLarochelle

When the 1st covid wave hit, the Alberta government acted quickly to put restrictions in place, close the schools, etc. Overall, I can’t fault their initial reaction to a total unknown. But I also can’t help but think of how differently NDP/Rachel Notley would have responded 1/14

Rachel Notley would never have stood in the #ableg in May 2020 and undermined ALL future pandemic efforts by calling covid ‘an influenza’ that is primarily a problem for old people who have already outlived their life expectancy. 2/14

(By the way, did you know that the average age at death for covid has gone down from 82 to 79 since then?) That set the tone. The anti-vaxxing and anti-masking covidiots still spout some version of that. 3/14

I think NDP would have put something more in place right away to support businesses who had to close and people who had to stay home from work to isolate. Compliance would be easier if it was less of a hardship. 4/14

When it came time to lift restrictions in summer of 2020, NDP would have gone more gradually, and kept a closer eye on what that would mean for school in the fall. There would have been a much stronger plan for school protocols. Better than “robust”. 5/14

NDP’s ideas about what to do for school in 2020-2021 were shot down, with the ridiculous false dichotomy that doing *anything* would mean having to build hundreds of schools and double the teaching staff. 6/14

Realistically, there was a lot of vacant space that could have been used like offices, community or church halls, etc. to spread kids out. Any reduction of class sizes would have helped. Taking 2 classes of 30 down to 3 classes of 20 would have reduced risks for 60 families. 7/14

They also would have had more contact tracing in place right away, I think. So the numbers would likely not have started to rise sharply 2 weeks after school was back in. But, they would still have risen, because covid DOES spread in school and NDP would not deny that. 8/14

So, if a ‘circuit breaker’ had become necessary, and hundreds of health care professionals had begged for it to be implemented, NDP would have done that right away. I’m sure Rachel Notley would not have disappeared for weeks, like Kenney did in November. 9/14

Acting quickly would have brought the numbers down faster and probably not have impacted the holiday season business for stores and restaurants in the way it did because UCP waited too long. Certainly, the NDP caucus members would not have jetted off to tropical vacations. 10/14

When restrictions were necessary, there would not have been the foolish months in trying to persuade groups like Grace Life Church to comply when it was clear that they had no intention to do so. UCP’s game of chicken with them led others to refuse to comply as well. 11/14

And on and on it goes. The utter failure in leadership by UCP is not an isolated incident, but a litany of bad judgement, pandering to RWNJs, allowing ideology to trump science and logic, acting as though covid behaves differently in some circumstances than others, etc. 12/14

UCP has made every covid-related problem much worse than it needed to be through their own rhetoric and inaction, since May of 2020. I didn’t even mention picking fights with health care workers, nurses, and doctors yet, It’s egregious. 13/14

And finally, the complete silence of the entire UCP caucus during this worst part of the crisis—worst because of THEIR Open For Summer debacle—just illustrates that these people are no leaders and they are absolutely not here for us. NDP would not have done this. 14/14