Alberta Premier Danielle Smith holds her first press conference in Edmonton, on Oct. 11.JASON FRANSON/The Canadian Press
I’m concerned about Danielle Smith. Perhaps she’s been too busy campaigning to get out much, or talk to people, or read, um, anything. What other explanation could there be for the brand new Alberta Premier’s comment this week that unvaccinated Canadians were the most discriminated group she has witnessed in her lifetime?
She did issue a statement the next day to clarify that she did not intend to trivialize in any way the discrimination faced by persecuted groups in Canada or around the world. While she did not actually apologize, she said she’s committed to “listening, learning and addressing the issues affecting minority communities.”
I want to help!
There a few people I would like to introduce to Ms. Smith.
Born in 1971, she was just a girl when Pol Pot led Cambodia, so it’s understandable if she was unaware at the time of the terrors of the Khmer Rouge. People would be executed simply for displaying any sort of sign of intellect or Western influence – even wearing glasses or a watch. One man who managed to escape was Cambodian photojournalist Dith Pran, the subject of the Oscar-winning film The Killing Fields. “Mr. Dith survived by masquerading as an uneducated peasant, toiling in the fields and subsisting on as little as a mouthful of rice a day, and whatever small animals he could catch,” explained his Globe and Mail obituary in 2008.
Perhaps Ms. Smith does not know how gay men were treated in the 1980s as the AIDS epidemic exploded. Gay men – already discriminated against for their sexuality and suddenly dying at a horrific rate – were widely treated like pariahs: shunned, subjected to lectures about morality. Even laughed at.
If she can find some free time, Ms. Smith should watch the video diaries recorded by Peter Jepson-Young, known to most people as Dr. Peter. The Vancouver physician learned he was HIV positive in 1986. When it became apparent that he was losing his vision, he began recording his story for CBC Television.
Dr. Peter died in 1992. He was 35.
I am certain that Ms. Smith knows that 14 women were murdered in Montreal on Dec. 6, 1989, in a mass misogynistic shooting targeting female engineering students. An obvious and deadly example of discrimination.
In 1994, the Rwandan genocide killed hundreds of thousands of people. One survivor was Éloge Butera. Now a Canadian, he was 10 when violence against the Tutsis erupted. He and his brother spent days on the run until they were taken in and hidden by a Hutu family.
“It was a very abrupt end to what had otherwise been a peaceful and joyful childhood,” Mr. Butera told the CBC in an interview. He called himself “a witness to the worst human beings can do to one another.”
I know Ms. Smith was very busy campaigning at the time, but I wonder if she noticed a proliferation of people wearing orange shirts on Sept. 30.
The National Day for Truth and Reconciliation honours the countless Indigenous children who were removed – under Canadian law – from their families and sent away to residential schools. They were physically, sexually and emotionally abused. They were not allowed to speak their language. They were sometimes starved. Thousands died.
Phyllis Webstad was six when she was sent to St. Joseph’s Mission Residential School in British Columbia. Her grandmother wanted to give her something special to wear – a shiny orange shirt. But at the school, she was stripped and the shirt was taken away. “So I wear it today as a symbol of the healing that’s taking place,” she explained in the 2021 documentary Returning Home. Ms. Webstad founded the Orange Shirt Society.
I wish Ms. Smith had been on the SkyTrain in Vancouver with me about three years ago when I witnessed an older Asian woman being berated by a fellow passenger who accused her of being the reason he could not afford to buy a house in Vancouver.
And this was before the pandemic. Things have become much worse for Asian people in Vancouver – which marked a 717-per-cent increase in anti-Asian hate crimes between 2019 and 2020, resulting in international headlines referring to the city as the anti-Asian hate crime capital of North America. I’m surprised Ms. Smith, who seems to be interested in how people have been treated in the COVID-19 era, has missed that reporting.
There’s another woman I would have loved for Ms. Smith to meet, but, tragically, she died after being apprehended by the so-called morality police in Iran. Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman who was visiting Tehran, was accused of not wearing her hijab properly and taken into custody to be sent to a re-education facility. We all know what happened next.
Anyway, I could go on. But I have been busy talking to Canadians about intergenerational trauma and the Holocaust. I know it happened more than 25 years before Ms. Smith was born, but perhaps she has heard of it.