Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Foothills.
In Alberta, I am giving this speech from my riding in Calgary Nose Hill. What I would like everybody listening to this speech tonight to understand is that Alberta was in a very bad spot prior to the pandemic. We were in a severe economic downturn, and that really exacerbated part of the problem that we have faced here over the last year and a half. I would argue that in a lot of ways it has been worse.
I know that there has been a lot of conversation, and I have watched the media narrative play out over the last 72 hours, with comments like “Why are restrictions not working in Alberta like they are in other places?” with the implications that Albertans are not following the rules. Here is the reality from Calgary: People need to eat. Therefore, it is very paternalistic to say just that people who might not be following restrictions are doing so from a place of bourgeois contempt for the law.
There are so many people in my province, I would argue most people in my province, who want to do everything possible to abide by public health rules, and they are doing their best, but they are also really struggling. There are a lot of people in my community who do not have the luxury of being able to stay at home and work from home and self-isolate or wait for the disastrously termed “preferred vaccine”. That is just not the reality. Lockdown is a luxury for a lot of people in my community. That is the reality for gig economy workers, taxi drivers, people who were in the resource industry; they are the Alberta economy. We do look different economically than other parts of the country do, so yes, measures are going to affect how people respond differently. That is a reality that I just do not feel has been adequately acknowledged by policy-makers.
We need to start there. We need to start understanding that a year and a half into this, people want to do everything they can to observe these measures, but they also feel like there has to be an end in sight; they need to work—