Alberta Minute: Border Blockade, Restriction Updates, and Vaccine Passport Dead

Alberta Minute - Your weekly one-minute summary of Alberta politics.

This Week In Alberta:

• The Legislature will be quiet this week. It’s adjourned until February 22nd. Committees, however, are carrying on at full tilt, beginning today with the Select Special Child and Youth Advocate Search Committee meeting at 9:00 am. 
  
  
• The Select Special Committee to Examine Safe Supply will meet on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday from 9:00 am until 3:00 pm each day. The Committee is accepting written submissions on issues relating to its mandate and the deadline is coming up on March 4th. If you have an opinion about safe drug supply, be sure to write them here. The Select Special Committee on Real Property Rights will meet on Wednesday at 6:00 pm. The posted agenda provides virtually no information.
  
  
• Starting today, students in the province no longer have to wear masks. School boards in Calgary and Edmonton said they wished the Province had waited longer to remove the mandates but the Minister of Education, Adriana LaGrange, is preventing boards from imposing a mask mandate of their own.

Last Week In Alberta:

• The Provincial Government announced the end of the much-maligned Restrictions Exemption Program (AKA the vaccine passport) following the Coutts border protest and several other protests in Edmonton and throughout the province. The program ended at midnight on February 9th. So long and good riddance.
  
  
• The government also announced a plan for lifting additional restrictions pending continued downward pressure on hospitals. Further afield, several other provinces such as Saskatchewan, Quebec, Manitoba, and Nova Scotia announced the lifting of their pandemic measures as well. The next step for Alberta will come March 1st, when, amongst other things, all mask mandates are supposed to be removed. We’re hopeful, but we seen this story before...

• The RCMP are warning that enforcement is the only option left to get traffic flowing at the Coutts border crossing. Police have ticketed vehicles and provided another location near Milk River for the protestors to relocate.

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