With both Ontario and Quebec walking back their vaccine mandates in the healthcare industry due to labour shortages, the only question is how long until Jason Kenney flip flops on the issue.
On Wednesday, Ontario Premier Doug Ford cancelled the mandate for healthcare workers after tens of thousands of workers refused to get the vaccine before the deadline, essentially threatening to crash the entire system.
“The impact of the potential departure of tens of thousands of health care workers is weighed against the small number of outbreaks that are currently active in Ontario’s hospitals,” said Ford.
“Having looked at the evidence, our government has decided to maintain its flexible approach by leaving human resourcing decisions up to individual hospitals.”
Like clockwork, Quebec, which was facing its own potential shortage, followed suit only hours later.
Despite this calamity in the making, Alberta Premier Jason Kenney has yet to say whether he, too, will flip flop on the issue — but given his track record, it isn’t beyond the realm of possibility.
Kenney seems to have taken his marching orders from Ford and Legault throughout the pandemic, waiting until they give a tacit ‘okay’ for him to impose the exact same policies with only slight caveats.
Mask mandates, vaccine mandates, vaccine passports, QR codes, restrictions, and lockdowns. If Ontario or Quebec implements a policy and sets a precedent, you can count on Kenney giving his stamp of approval.
However, this is the first big win in any of the provinces for Canadians who actually care about their right to seek and retain employment without getting an experimental mRNA vaccine, so it will be interesting to see whether Kenney will follow suit and return to respecting people’s rights and freedoms as he once pretended to do.
If history is any guide, we’ll likely receive an answer to this question in less than a week.
