Let’s begin by looking at two examples that appear unrelated, the COVID 19 virus and the ideology of conservatism.
Facts: A pandemic of some sort was never a matter of if but when; currently the immediate threat of this virus, like your common cold, is only a serious danger to those with a weakened immune system such as the elderly.
Could this change, of course it could, but if you listen to the media you would think the world is coming to an end and we should all be afraid of an imminent horrific death. Even people who can still find toilet paper are not immune.
So here’s my point; the irresponsibility of the press to feed on our fears is leading us into a global depression. I’m not saying we ‘ignore’ reality or ‘hide our heads in the sand’, I’m just saying we do what we can and move on. For a pandemic, we are actually lucky because the lethality of this virus is so low.
Just as the press is ‘selective’ in the facts they use, those ‘facts’ form a narrative. The Kenney government also seems to be focused on creating a narrative based on the narrowest interpretation of ‘conservatism’. Just as the press arguably fails to act in the best interest of Canadians, so too does the Kenney government seem to ignore the economic and societal realities of the majority of Albertans.
Every day we hear about the millions/billions of dollars that this government is ‘saving’ and that ‘short term pain for long term gain’ is the only way forward. We are asked to blindly trust this government without question regarding the math/science behind the numbers/decisions. In fact we have largely lost our ability to get verifiable information from this government.
But only the truly indoctrinated could really believe it there is only one path forward or that AB ‘only has a spending problem, not a revenue problem.
Trying to keep an election promise to eliminate the deficit in one election cycle was never needed but trying to do this during a recession and pandemic is both absurd and dangerous. At a time when most leading economists are talking about stimulus, our government seems to be ‘doubling down’ on their current plans of austerity. At a time when we need to increase capacity in our already overburdened public systems, our government seems to want to strip the last remaining vestiges of capacity out of these systems when we need them the most. We have options; we just need this government to listen to more than their own ‘echo chamber’.
For both COVID-19 and the Kenney government, my true fear is this; the reality is very much different than the political spin we are being told and the true price of this rhetoric could be our future.
- Dan Cunin
