EDMONTON – Danielle Smith made international headlines during her first day as premier of Alberta by claiming that the unvaccinated are the most discriminated-against group she’d ever seen, but the new leader of the UCP has since reflected and now thoughtfully concedes that there could be some crimes against humanity that might be almost as bad as an antivaxxer not being able to board a plane to Las Vegas.
“I made comments regarding the discrimination unvaccinated individuals have suffered through over the past two years. My intention was to underline the mistreatment of individuals who chose not to be vaccinated and were punished,” Smith said in a statement Wednesday. “I fully acknowledge that some other groups throughout history have suffered as much as unvaccinated Albertans have suffered. It’s not a contest. If it were, it would be a tie.”
While Smith initially claimed that the unvaccinated “have been the most discriminated-against group that I’ve ever witnessed in my lifetime,” she has admitted that while people who made the decision to refuse to get free, safe vaccinations during a deadly pandemic have suffered a terrible injustice in the form of their actions having consequences, other people may have suffered as much.
“I did not intend to trivialize the discrimation faced by many minority communities and other persecuted groups or to create any false equivalencies to the terrible historical discrimination and persecution suffered by so many minority groups,” Smith’s statement continued. “And I didn’t, because as I’ve made clear in my initial statement and this follow-up, people who choose not to be vaccinated are victims of discrimination and all forms of discrimination are terrible, whether it be decades of racial segregation in aparteid South Africa, or an unvaccinated man being unable to eat at Hooters for about a year.”
“We need to actively work together as Albertans and Canadians to end all discrimination against all minority communitites. We need to come together, regardless of our ethnicity, vaccine status, or current COVID viral load, and talk face to face. Unmasked, of course. That’s the only way to move forward into a future in which no one is excluded from society. Except the immunocompromised.”
We attempted to speak to several Albertans about this developing story, but after being informed that Danielle Smith’s first full week as premier still isn’t even over, most were too demoralized to form words.
