Alberta’s COVID-19 crisis becomes fuel for federal campaigns | At Issue

[Music] it is now clear that we were wrong and for that i apologize alberta premier jason kenney last night after declaring a covet 19 state of emergency in the province alongside much stricter measures and vaccine passports this just two months after alberta lifted most pandemic restrictions with some praise from the conservative leader and when aaron o'toole was asked repeatedly this morning whether he still thinks kenny handled the pandemic the right way he had this to say all provinces have shifted and adjusted based on the various waves of the pandemic but what the provinces have not had is a consistent and reliable partner in ottawa mr o'toole is still letting the anti-vaxxers within his own party run the show so with just a few days now to go till election day will any of this sway voters to make sense of the last few days and because it's thursday i'm here but with at issue chantally bear andrew coyne althea althea raj and eliminable much more good to see everybody i appreciate you being here we're going to see a lot more of you in the days ahead but this was an interesting development uh in alberta and one obviously that the liberal leader seized upon is it the kind of thing that is potentially an opening for the liberal leader is it troubling for aaron o'toole i'm going to start with you althea because i believe you're following the conservatives right now yeah actually i i do think it has the potential to change things i mean the liberals have been trying to make the ballot box question who um can handle the pandemic better who do you trust to handle the pandemic and mr o'toole and mr singh actually had been trying to make the ballot question more of a referendum on justin trudeau and i think that the referendum questions seem to be getting traction like you know why would you give your vote to a leader who called an election only for his own personal gain like the liberals have not been able to get away from that and yet yesterday with mr kenny's admission that he got it wrong that he regrets being over enthusiastic of reopening it puts the pandemic now front and center in this election campaign and mr o'toole has had a lot of difficulty not just with members of his caucus as that um that pack showed uh he himself has is on the record endorsing mr kenny uh endorsing his reopening plan and that is a very devastating attack at this time when many people may have died because jason kenney decided to reopen the province too early and and it comes also on the same day we should say that saskatchewan premier scott mo also had to put different measures in place and say he's also going to move towards a vaccine passport sean tell your thoughts and so did blaine higgs and new brunswick so i'm guessing the circle has been squared on this uh it's not good news for aaron o'toole and i suspect that if it had been possible uh in light of rising cases numbers for all those premiers to wait till next week to do what they did they would have and it tells you how dire the increase in cases is that they could not because their own political situation was becoming untenable um it's damaging on two scores these are allies of eren o'toole there is no denying that and they are coming late to the vaccine passport uh issue but it also will feed into maxim bernie's rhetoric about freedoms being taken away and give more motivation for people uh uh who believe that to go out and vote for maxim bernie okay andrew your sense you're in calgary tonight i'm not sure what you're hearing out there but your sense of how this is playing out i think you have to separate logic from politics here logically it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to for this to be attached to a tool there's no doubt that kenny screwed up but lots of the premiers are screwed up in different ways of all different parties because this was all within provincial jurisdiction which the federal government was happy to leave to the provinces the provinces were left to handle questions like lockdowns questions like administering the doses of vaccines etc uh so that happened under justin trudeau's watch you can't blame trudeau for that but you can't really blame a tool for it either this it just it's the matter of different jurisdictions if we were talking about federal jurisdiction that are in federal the federal role in this we'd be talking about the failure to close the borders quickly enough we'd be talking about the failure to stockpile personal protective equipment uh we'd be talking about uh you know the the shutting down of the early warning systems and so on so that's the logic the politics is kenny's a conservative a tool's a conservative in politics guilt by association is fair game and so there's no doubt that the tool is going to take a pacing for this yeah i guess the one caveat i would put forward is that mr o'toole applauded uh jason kenney's management of the pandemic which which i mean you know maybe he does think that he did a good job up until now but it seems like that's the connection point too is it not yeah i don't i don't buy that at all i don't buy that it's not connected at all i mean uh earlier today our our cbc colleagues travis don raj had a twitter thread that just kept on adding on and on and on how about several different journals we kept on asking the question of aaron o'toole of hey why did you say that that alberta handled this pandemic better than the federal government did and he had no answer to this and it actually kind of made clear that um the conservative campaign really had one gear which is that this was going to be an election about the covet recovery um and now that the ballot box question is once again how to manage a pandemic that is still ongoing and this of course has highlighted that again uh it appears as though o2 is kind of struggling to find that other deal andrew you want it back in there then chantal oh i i just the point would be uh again the logic is if you allowed aaron o'toole to be prime minister then premiers would like kennedy would screw up kenny's premier's like kenny screwed up under the current prime minister it just doesn't actually make the connection sure chantal a couple of points uh going back to this notion that uh aaron o'toole did say that jason kenny had handled the pandemic better than justin trudeau and he's got to live with that statement comes at a terrible time for him in the campaign but that's too bad because it wasn't a fact that jason kenny had handled the pandemic better when he taped that thing second yes premiers who are powerful do have influence on the prime minister if they are of the same persuasion and this is a federal leader who has been stating that he would never challenge anything that the province does never challenge a provincial law he also has to live with that and third blaming justin trudeau for recalling a federal election to deflect blame it's fair game to the to debate the federal election timing but it has nothing to do with how jason kenney or scott mull have been uh managing the pandemic last word very quickly althea then we'll come back for one more round yeah there are three things i think that hurt mr o'toole because basically mr kenny yesterday said mia culpa on these issues one is the vaccine passports with mr o'toole has refused to say whether or not he supports one is the fact that he was trying to be you know on both sides not accept mandatory vaccination and that seems like everybody's going in one direction including the business community and mr o'toole's on another side and third i think this is the most devastating he kept referring to vaccination as a personal health decision and mr kenny yesterday said basically yeah it's a personal health decision but everybody else is implicated with it and basically this is a decision for which there are societal costs [Music] that's the kind of leadership and vision that aaron o'toole is going to bring to the new canada vote for the liberal party for the prime minister justin trudeau that i named associate in a long time because i was in the house with his father it's my favorite part of the campaign when former prime ministers come out on the trail brian mulroney last night supporting aaron o'toole and of course jacquez supporting justin trudeau what do those uh those endorsements those outings say about this last pitch to voters back with me now althea chantal element and andrew chantal this is obviously you know a try to boost momentum and all sorts of things but what does it tell you about the campaign if anything i don't think you should put them in parallel i believe uh jean-claude coming out gives and it's not meant to make you so nostalgic that you suddenly want to vote for one or the other it's meant to make liberal or conservative foot soldiers feel so good about their party that they're going to work harder to get the vote out and i believe that is true of shankritsen that is the impact he has on liberals who are working to get liberals elected brian mulroney is another proposition in quebec i'm not sure that there is an organization to get the vote out but he is popular but west of quebec the problem with the brian mulroney outing is that there are many foot soldiers who see themselves as part of the stephen harper party who are saying what is happening here or where is this other successful prime minister who apparently has been consigned to watching reruns in a space uh andrew i mean it also you also wonder if it's trying to send or or reinforce the message that aaron o'toole is uh more moderate than than than maybe other conservatives out there yeah i think the muruni thing may have been more aimed at the at the undecided voter uh at trying to reassure people i mean this has been the whole tory campaign till now has been to try to reassure people that uh we've we've uh tamped down some of the more unruly factions within the party we're squarely in the mainstream we're actually not that much different from the liberals etc uh and mulrooney was a highly successful conservative prime minister you know back-to-back majorities that's a good thing to be able to say you know if you if you liked the conservative brand then maybe you'll like uh maybe you'll some of that association will rub off on the current crop of conservatives particularly the idea of progressive but but to chantal's point althea is there could it backfire could it actually upset some people oh i already know lots of harper people were upset by seeing brian maroney out on the campaign trail for aaron o'toole um i just want to say that i agree actually wholeheartedly with everything sheltali and andrew just said the one thing i will add though is speaking to conservative incumbents in quebec where mr mulvaney did the outing um in orford yesterday um they believe that it's going to help them with national nationalist quebecers that mr mulroney can remind block supporters that you know there once was this great big conservative family where nationalist voters were included in there and wasn't it great look at all the things we accomplished from fighting apartheid to the acid water treaty to free trade when you were all in the big family together and this is what we can accomplish together if you vote for a party that can actually form government and so that was something that uh conservative incumbents were really hoping that mr mulroney's outing will do yeah i will say i know harper writes people who are fans of stephen harper who were pleased to see mr mulroney too so yeah well i don't know that everyone was upset obviously uh ella bean and then uh i think we got to wrap it up yup i mean i mean sure if you are a harper conservative you might be pleased to see mo bernie sure it's nice to see old friends but also at the same time harper governed this country for a long time and it feels like a really uh significant sort of absence to just kind of skip that all together um and and also i don't think we should be awarding aaron o'toole any points for subtlety here he also said as much right he said that uh he is maybe trying to move the party away from what you might have come to think about it and so i i think if you're a hyper conservative sure you might smile with mulberries on tv but uh you can't be too happy about saying hey man we actually managed to govern yeah we managed to win a majority need we remind you as as recently as just 10 years ago does it do you think chantal if it's if there's a real desire as you all seem to agree to reassure people what does that tell us about the state of the otool campaign it tells us something about aaron o'toole who ran as the anti-return of the red tories mulroney style a year ago for the leadership and is now happy to uh have brian mulroney contrast with stephen harper about the nostalgia in quebec for the mulroney era yeah all these things are all true uh but i guess you have to put them to the mix the failure of the image laker board etc etc so no there are not that many fond memories of great successes when you put that failure inside the mix for a national risk record okay i got to leave it there thank you all very much and people will be pleased to hear that you're coming back sunday night before election night and you'll all be here of course for many many hours on election night so thank you all very much that's at issue for tonight you can catch me and my show rosemary barton live at 10 a.m this sunday again we will have more of the national on sunday as well one last time before the polls close

Channel: CBC News: The National

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Keywords: Canada Votes 2021, ​alberta covid, jason kenney, alberta covid surge campaign trail, justin trudeau alberta, trudeau kenney, erin o’toole jason kenney, erin o’toole alberta, alberta federal election, election, canada election, federal election, 2021 election, election campaign, canada election 2021, campaign trail, at issue, at issue cbc, at issue panel, at issue alberta, Rosemary Barton, Althia Raj, Chantal Hebert, Andrew Coyne, Elamin Abdelmahmoud, CBC, The National

Id: 6A8px8rCG9o

Length: 13min 47sec (827 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 16 2021