The Main — September 8: 'It’s disrespectful when a higher government chooses not to make tough choices'
The relationship between smaller municipalities and the province has not been easy during the pandemic
As the 8,400-person town of Edson last week stared down a spike in COVID infections, as well as dwindling acute-care beds at its local hospital thanks to staff shortages and a provincial government that remained silent for three weeks despite abundant evidence that action was needed, the local government contemplated creating a mask bylaw.
Mayor Kevin Zahara, who’s running for re-election in Edson, says the council met to discuss the potential bylaw. He and some of the council felt pushed to do something — anything — while the province, which has jurisdiction over public health as well as access to reams of data on COVID-19, continued to offer up little guidance.
“We were very concerned by the province’s response,” Zahara says, in an interview with Rage.
One day later, Premier Jason Kenney’s United Conservative Party government broke its silence and reversed many of the public health measures they had revoked. That meant Edson no longer needed to fill the vacuum. But the fact the local government, staffed by people who pull full-time hours but earn far less than full-time honourariums, had been forced to conjure up a potential fix during a pandemic underlines Zahara’s clear disillusionment.
He’s not alone. Recently, a group of frustrated regional mayors called on the province to create a vaccine passport and school masking rules to combat Alberta’s fourth wave because the province remains an outlier on passports. Municipal leaders, it seems, are angered by the spiking numbers while also less worried about the vote concerns that could be informing provincial decisions on public health and COVID-19 as Kenney tries to keep his caucus on his side.
Recall, on this point, that back in April, a group of 17 United Conservative Party MLAs publicly condemned Kenney’s use of public-health restrictions to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, and that back in May, 18 members of the UCP caucus refused to share with a CTV reporter whether they intended to get vaccinated. Kenney’s caucus is not united on vaccines.
Rural mayors could be feeling an amplified version of the sense of powerlessness that many in Alberta feel as a result.
Zahara says the latest numbers he’s seen indicate that 150 people in the town and surrounding community have COVID-19 and that the local hospital, which normally has 24 acute-care beds, is down to 18 beds due to staff shortages. The danger is clear. Meanwhile, while Zahara didn’t have the most recent vaccination numbers for the town, he says Edson and the surrounding region lag about 15 points behind the provincial average on first and second dose rates.
That difference is common for rural Alberta. A recent CBC analysis showed that while Alberta has roughly 70 per cent of its population with two shots, the numbers are much lower in many rural parts of the province. The analysis found 16 regions in the province where second-does vaccine rates are less than 50 per cent.
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Rural municipalities are feeling the pressure and have not felt supported, Zahara says.
“Public health is clearly a provincial responsibility. They have the info, the expertise; municipalities do not,” he says. “It’s been very frustrating to say the least where the provincial government has the responsibility and wants to offload that on municipalities or school boards, yet when it comes to things in our jurisdiction, they’re trying to interfere.
“They’re not sharing data. This type of situation would work better if everyone was working together, but it hasn’t seemed to be that way. Municipalities are left scrambling to understand what the rules are as the government closest to the people. We have to deal with the day-to-day questions and concerns. There’s much learning to be done. There’s no playbook to do this properly and there’s no easy decisions. But it seems even though we’re supposed to be partners, it often has felt like we were an afterthought.”
What does Zahara mean by interfering, though?
He points to the provincial push to consider changes to rural policing.
“They’re trying to tell us that a certain police force in rural Alberta is better,” he says. “We work with the RCMP, we’re on the ground, we’re paying the majority of the bills, we have the contracts. The province seems to have no problem interfering in stuff like that. We’ve seen in other waves [of the pandemic] where municipalities did do mask bylaws, while people in the government caucus were criticizing municipal leadership [for those bylaws]. It’s disrespectful when a higher government chooses not to make those tough choices.”
Zahara says the pandemic has ground down all elected officials, regardless of the government they serve in. But, again, he says it’s local politicians who have faced some of the harshest experiences.
“For those of us in the municipal world, we get the brunt of the communication, the anger, whether or not it’s a decision we make. We’ve tried to communicate the provincial messaging and of course we get the heat for it. It weighs on you. I’ve talked to some of my councillors, they’ve been chastised and given the finger. We’re all trying to do the best we can. No one signs up for that.”