A note to Jason Kenny

Dear Mr. Kenney:

You're under attack from within your own party - and the other side's happily cheering these people on. So now what?

Reverse course: pull a Trump, tell the delusional to suck eggs, and get on with it.

Here's the problem: you are fundamentally a retail politician so you value the voices you hear without recognizing that those doing the shouting represent a tiny minority of Albertans - and without noticing that they only quote their own fellow travelers in insisting on the same conclusions without ever pointing at factual evidence for any of their claims.

You've made some horrific mistakes. I believe, for example, that the MacKinnon report expanded on some campaign rhetoric to develop policy recommendations that were certain to enrage and so empower your opposition without achieving anything for the province - and you jumped willingly into that disaster.

In a different way you failed to reverse course when it became obvious that the federal government does not have Alberta's best interests at heart on anything, and certainly not on pipelines and the environment - and then failed again when it became obvious in March and April of last year that the right response to the covid mess was to pull a Sweden: protect the most vulnerable and get it over with for everyone else.

So, big mistakes: but is it too late?

No: you can save your leadership, the PC party, and the provincial economy by doing now what you should have done a year ago: tell the screaming harridans and the media people cheering them on that you sympathize deeply while simply dropping all the covid related public health controls right now. A few thousand Albertans will dominate the news for weeks by parading around loudly predicting mass death, carrying coffins into the ledge, and demanding your head, but millions will silently drop their masks and go about their normal lives --and that silence will turn into votes when you remind them, during the next campaign, of how dishonest the NDP and their media colleagues are on this.

Note: There is a dead simple way to test the belief in masks and lockdowns.  Pick a data source you think you can trust - I like the Johns-Hopkins site for this because the fact that it's run entirely by and for democrats means it is extremely unlikely to slant the data in favour of the anti-lockdown position. Then have someone extract and graph the total monthly mortality per 100,000 population for all of 2020 and the first quarter of 2021 for 40 or more jurisdictions covering, between them, widely differing policies on masking and/or lockdown.  If lockdown/masking policies are effective you should be able to pick out the jurisdictions with the greatest allegiance to these ideas at a glance. If you can't, they're wrong - and you can't, no one can; because, overall, the open states and countries are increasingly pulling ahead of those trying for control.

And further? there are good things you can do to get the budget under control, to improve education and health care, and to build the economy - but they aren't in the MacKinnon report and you won't get them from your usual crew of sycophants, so how about a nice open policy conference where you listen to the party members - you know, the people who worked hard to get you elected?