The Human Condition: Discrimination

By Daniel Schnee on October 19, 2022.

I really try not to repeat myself when it comes to writing this column. I want to provide variety for readers, but yet again we have been presented with a statement by Premier Danielle Smith that requires discussion.

She had previously stated, “The (unvaccinated) have been the most discriminated against group that I’ve ever witnessed in my lifetime,” in reference to their not being allowed to attend hockey games, travel on planes and getting fired from their jobs for refusing to follow regulations. She has now retracted the statement by saying, “I want to be clear that I did not intend to trivialize the discrimination faced by minority communities and other persecuted groups or create any false equivalencies to the terrible historical discrimination and persecution suffered by so many minority groups.”

Quite frankly, her second statement is even worse, considering how she relegates the ongoing struggles of minorities to the past, and elevates the consequences of free choice to the level of “discrimination.” She implies those who freely chose to ignore public safety regulations experienced intolerance of a kind Smith has never seen in her 51 years of life.

Indigenous peoples still don’t fully possess many essential freedoms which Smith’s unvaccinated followers have. For example, many people think Indigenous people can do whatever they want with their lands and resources. The Indian Act, though, reveals status Indians don’t actually own property on reserves, which is Crown land. It cannot be bought and sold like regular real estate, which makes it hard for them to borrow money to build a house, start a business, and so on. The fact Smith would equate vaccination requirements with such a situation shows she has not done her homework on the needs of her fellow, Indigenous Albertans.

Also, the residential school system became a source of extreme trauma for generations of Indigenous children through culturally directed mental harm, and forcible removal. Yet the last Albertan residential school closed in 1996, when Smith was 25 … well into her lifetime. If Smith thinks not being able to go to a hockey game is akin to being forced to not speak your ancestral tongue this shows how dangerously out of touch she is with her (or indeed any) generation.

Indeed, the fact she can still equate any of the various struggles of Indigenous peoples with contemporaries who chose not to wear a paper mask shows Smith had no actual change of ideology, or heart. She still is exactly who she was when she made her original statement.

She also gave the game away yet again by saying she would amend human rights law to protect those who choose not to be vaccinated for diseases, including COVID: implying resisting vaccination for other diseases such as polio or malaria is a human right. Threatening the health of others is illegal in Canada, yet Smith wants to make it a human right to do so.

Smith says she wants to listen to us. But once again she has shown that “us” does not take into account so many whose daily financial and social difficulties go far beyond wearing a paper mask at a restaurant. At the very least you know something is wrong when your premier’s apology is as bad as the statement she is apologizing for.

Dr. Daniel Schnee is an anthropologist and jazz/rock drummer

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