Alberta Minute: Vaccine Mandates, Unallocated Funds, and a Chief Firearms Officer

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

This Week In Alberta:

• Many school districts around the province will be returning to school this week (yep, summer's over already!). The provincial government have said that they will not be providing province-wide rules around masking, cohorts and so forth this year, but school districts are free to make their own plans.
  
  
• The provincial government will make available "immunization confirmation cards" that disclose vaccination status, despite saying they will not be implementing domestic vaccine passports as Manitoba, BC and Ontario will apparently be doing. So much for constitutionally guaranteed freedom of movement!
  
  
• Finally, the Alberta Legislature's break continues until October 25th. There are no committee meetings this week, either.

Last Week In Alberta:

• The Alberta government confirmed to us, and then publicly announced that they will *not* be providing the federal government with Albertans' vaccination status and data for use in a federal vaccine passport. This is good news, and an excellent victory for civil liberties and privacy. Provinces are right to resist this federal intrusion into provincial jurisdiction.
  
  
• Alberta appointed its own provincial firearms officer, Teri Bryant. She was a member of the Alberta Firearms Advisory Committee and served as secretary of the Alberta Arms and Cartridge Collectors Association for the past 16 years. She is also president of the Military Collectors Club of Canada. Previously the Chief Firearms officer in Alberta was filled by a federal appointee, but provinces have been allowed to appoint their own officers.

• It's not often that we agree with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, however, they pointed out last week that the province substantially increased its unallocated COVID-19 funds for the 2021-22 fiscal year, from the $750 million it had expected to use to almost $1.8 billion after the 2021 budget was released. The concern is that large unallocated funds make it difficult to examine what the money will be spent on until after it has been spent.

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