During the United Conservative party’s annual general meeting, Alberta’s new Premier Danielle Smith is seeking legal advice on pardoning Canadians that got arrested or fined for violating COVID-19 rules such as not having a vaccine passport.
“We are human beings,” said Smith. “We are not QR codes,” she said, adding that she wanted to “purge” the QR database.
Related: How vaccine passports are crushing freedom, privacy, and civil liberties
“I believe that Alberta Health Services is the source of a lot of the problems that we’ve had,” she said.
“They signed some kind of partnership with the World Economic Forum right in the middle of the pandemic; we’ve gotta address that. Why in the world do we have anything to do with the World Economic Forum? That’s got to end.”
“The things that come to top of mind for me are people who got arrested as pastors (and) people given fines for not wearing masks,” Smith said. “These are not things that are normal to get fines and get prosecuted for. I’m going to look into the range of outstanding fines and get some legal advice on which ones we are able to cancel and provide amnesty for.”
Smith also doubled down on her promise to amend the Human Rights Act to ban discrimination based on Covid vaccination status. She said the amendment would focus on Covid vaccines because the issue is not medical, it is political.
“Since it was a very specific reaction to a very specific vaccine mandate, we’re going to be very precise when we write the legislation,” she said.
“We have to get back to an attitude of ‘you take a vaccine to protect yourself.’
“[But] we have to get away from this attitude that you demonize those who make a different choice.”
Smith is a vocal opponent of vaccine passports and mandates, especially the Alberta Health Services (AHS) for not allowing people to work if they are not vaccinated against Covid. According to the premier, people not vaccinated against Covid are the most discriminated against she has seen in her life.
Smith vowed to reorganize the AHS governance system and fire the entire board.
“The system, my friends, is broken,” she said. “Most of those managing AHS today are holdovers from the NDP years. They have had their chance to fix this bloated system and they have largely failed on almost all accounts. Failure is no longer an option.”
