Alberta has seen regular COVID protests and conferences like the one that drew about 500 people to the Southside Victory Church Fellowship in Calgary last month for an event billed as “An Injection of Truth Town Hall.” Another 6,000 people watched online.
But this was different. It was hosted by the Calgary-Lougheed United Conservative Party Constituency Association and defended by Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, despite the inflammatory speakers. Six UCP MLAs attended, including government whip Shane Getson.
The event promised to explain why mRNA vaccines like the COVID shots pose a risk to children. Speakers claimed excessive deaths in children — beyond those normally expected — increased by 3,380 per cent during the pandemic and blamed the vaccine.
But the speakers went much further. Attendees heard accusations that the regulatory body for Alberta doctors protected pedophiles and health officials had been “killing our children.”
Others gave presentations on the dangerous ingredients in the COVID-19 vaccine, health coverups and the rise of communism in Canada.
Dr. William Makis went the furthest. Makis, a former nuclear medicine physician at the Cross Cancer Institute in Edmonton, said the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta “protected or gave back licences to individual doctors who sexually assaulted children as young as five years old.”
“They're giving pedophiles access to Alberta's children,” Makis said. “Let's rename the college the College of Pedophiles and Child Sex Abusers of Alberta. It'll be much more indicative of what they've been doing for the last four years.”
College of Physicians and Surgeons registrar Scott McLeod called Makis’s comments “disturbing, unfounded and inflammatory.”
“The defamatory comments made at a recent event reflect the ongoing negative rhetoric we’ve seen online from this speaker in recent months,” McLeod said.
Several presentations featured pictures — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the NDP health critic Luanne Metz and University of Alberta law professor Timothy Caulfield, who has challenged vaccine misinformation — which were met with jeers from the crowd. Several of those pictured were accused of being “NDP allies” or of covering up the reported excessive deaths in children.
Both Metz and Caulfield declined an interview, with Caulfield specifically citing concerns over safety and harassment.
Multiple health-care professionals, academics and politicians have criticized the event, including Metz and Caulfield.
However, Premier Smith expressed support for the event in a segment of her radio show, Your Province. Your Premier, on May 18.
“I believe that sometimes, you do need to hear the contrarian voices... and all through COVID, the contrarian voices were de-platformed and not listened to, ” Smith said. “We’re now in a position where — with a couple of years — I think we have to look at the international evidence. As I understand it, that’s what [Calgary-Lougheed MLA Eric Bouchard] is doing in hosting a variety of doctors in giving their perspective.
“I’m quite happy to let him continue on with that.”
Lorian Hardcastle, an assistant professor in the faculty of law at the University of Calgary, said that these beliefs show “just how polarized things have become” in the UCP.
The party is playing a “dangerous game when members of government engage with those views,” she said.
Previous Conservative governments, including UCP Premier Jason Kenney’s, attempted to “walk the middle line,” Hardcastle said, to appeal to more members of their voter base.
However, Smith does not share “the same reluctance” to engage with “extremist rhetoric,” she said.
In his introduction at the event, Bouchard said that speakers, event organizers and constituency president Darrell Komick and he experienced “overwhelming” hate leading up to the town hall.
“Cancel culture is alive and well, and there are many out there who did not want this town hall to occur,” he added. “We all deserve the truth. In Alberta, it's time to face the truth so we can move our beautiful province forward, strong and free.”
Komick thanked those in attendance for being “open to the idea of asking questions.” Before finishing his speech, he asked the crowd why “something as painful as a number of unexplained deaths in Alberta goes unanswered.”
“We asked the question at Calgary-Lougheed, and thanks to Eric, we're here tonight to try to give you some answers from science.”
Hardcastle said there was “something different about the COVID-19 vaccine in particular that brought... anti-vaxers out of the woodwork.”
Anti-vaccine movements exist around all vaccines, Hardcastle said. However, COVID-19 restrictions — such as the vaccine passport and social distancing — created a “sense of coercion” historically unseen with other vaccinations.
“I think that it really brought out that pushback from people who are opposed to government intervention.”
Additionally there were claims the vaccine had not been tested thoroughly and the process was rushed, Hardcastle said.
Several presentations at the town hall echoed this sentiment. During his presentation, Dr. Eric Payne, a former pediatric neurologist at Alberta Children’s Hospital, said that COVID-19 vaccinations were not tested to prove that they stopped transmission.
“We were told these things didn't skip any tests, which was absurd. We had two months’ safety data at the time,” Payne said. “These are genetic products, so we should have had 12 to 15 years.”
Hardcastle said these narratives “fuelled some of the rhetoric” surrounding the COVID-19 vaccine and its efficacy.
“People don't have the same fear of the measles, mumps, rubella vaccine because it's been around so long,” she added.
However, Hardcastle said the development of the COVID-19 vaccine was not rushed — it was “an all-hands-on-deck situation.” As well, technology used to develop the vaccine existed prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, and researchers were able to share data in a way they were not historically able to.
“It wasn't as though the vaccine was just pulled out of thin air,” Hardcastle said. “Those factors don't point to a lack of science, being rushed, or this kind of conspiracy hiding data about children dying.”
Anti-vaxers were once considered to be a fringe group, Hardcastle said. Now, events like these are being endorsed by the current UCP government, which gives them legitimacy. That’s part of the reason she believes attendance was so high.
“When the sitting government adds some credibility to your ideas, there is less of that fringe mentality,” Hardcastle said.
After being sworn in as premier on Oct. 11, 2022, Smith said that unvaccinated Canadians “have been the most discriminated group” she’s seen in her life.
Additionally, she promised to amend the Human Rights Act to include unvaccinated people as protected victims of discrimination. Hardcastle said these were just some examples that exemplified the UCP government’s endorsement of anti-vaccine beliefs.
The event’s final speaker, lawyer Jeff Rath, said that he was proud to be a member of the UCP. Rath’s law firm, Rath and Co., has filed a class-action lawsuit against the governments of Canada and Alberta “on behalf of those in Alberta harmed by the COVID-19 vaccines.”
“All of us, every week, need to urge [Smith] to hold the course and hold all of these people that were killing our children accountable,” Rath said at the town hall. “Everybody in AHS [Alberta Health Services] who is promoting childhood vaccines needs to be run out of AHS.”
The current provincial government has taken an “anti-science stance,” Hardcastle said.
Hardcastle said the restructuring of AHS — which has drawn criticism from health-care workers — is an example. These decisions will have prolonged impacts on Albertans and the Alberta health-care system, she added.
“It seems like this is a government that's allowing ideology to dictate the way they manage public health and the health-care system in general, which is of course concerning because there's financial consequences to those decisions,” she said. “And of course, there's consequences to the people who have to use the health-care system.”
Recruiting health-care workers could also become harder, Hardcastle says, especially as Alberta competes “with every other province across the country.”
Health-care professionals or students exploring where they should complete their residencies may not choose Alberta if it's “seen as a province where public health and health-care decisions are more ideological than they are evidence-based,” Hardcastle said.
“You could come here, or you can go to a province where the government openly endorses vaccinations.”
Hardcastle said one of the most interesting outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic was the personalization of health-care policies. There was a focus on turning individuals into “heroes or anti-heroes, depending on who you listened to,” she said.
As a result, when people became frustrated with the handling of the pandemic, they targeted individual government officials, rather than criticizing government policy on its own.
At the beginning of the pandemic, chief medical officers like Alberta’s Deena Hinshaw and B.C.’s Bonnie Henry were looked up to “by people who couldn’t previously name them,” Hardcastle said.
But as dissatisfaction grew, they became the targets for critics of pandemic measures and were subject to threats and personal abuse, she said, another aspect of the polarized debate.
Read more: Health, Rights + Justice, Politics, Alberta
Tyee Commenting Guidelines
Comments that violate guidelines risk being deleted, and violations may result in a temporary or permanent user ban. Maintain the spirit of good conversation to stay in the discussion and be patient with moderators. Comments are reviewed regularly but not in real time.
Do:
Do not: