I sense that, if Dr. Shahab had professional autonomy to issue Public Health Orders, he would issue an order to limit size of gatherings. However he is prohibited from doing so by @PremierScottMoe who refuses to disclose recommendations made to him by Dr. Shahab @SLangeneggerCBC https://t.co/X7YiYsKrHy
— Dennis Kendel (@DennisKendel) October 18, 2021
"Advisors advise, Ministers decide" was a famous declaration by Margaret Thatcher.
During the Wuhan Flu overreaction, this basic premise was completely ignored by people who claim to be smarter than you but in reality are barely competent enough to find out what a bullet tastes like.
In fact one of the primary issues with government responses in the 2020-2022 period was that they let medical advisors run rampant. Deena Hinshaw (the useless cunt who's now BC's problem) had far more authority in 2021 than the Chief Firearms Officer (which is a position which does exist) or Chief Digital Innovation Officer (which also exists) or Chief Economist (which doesn't exist). However that's not supposed to be how governments work.
I'm not even bringing in any democratic requirements, mind you: this applies just as much to a parliamentary system as it would to a dictatorship. Being in government means enacting public policy. Public policies always have positive impacts in some areas and negative impacts in other areas. It's the job of a government minister (even a Prime Minister) to make a decision based on the information they are provided. If your government policy is "increase provincial coffers in 2023" that's pretty easy to do: if I was advised by say Scott Moe on how to increase his government's 2023 revenue there are several rather easy policy levers to pull. You could execute every Saskatchewan resident whose net worth is greater than $1M and confiscate their money. You could mandate tomorrow that government nurses and teachers have to work for free and any who refuse can be executed and their net worth confiscated. You could sell off every inch of Crown Land to the highest bidder, impose 100% income tax on registered NDP donors and voters, the whole lot of it. Really easy to do.
Of course, revenue in 2024 may be a little lacklustre as a result. Of course there are less drastic ways to increase provincial revenue in 2023 and 2024 and maybe even 2025, but the general principle holds: there is a downside somewhere to these policy goals. Now its possible you're in a happy situation that you politically want the downside to happen to exactly the people the downside would happen to: ask the Occupy Wall Street fleabaggers how they think the downside of their "tax the rich" policies will produce less business investment in medium sized businesses, for example. Yet that downside still exists.
Public healthcare cancelled surgeries and closed health clinics to both free up "much needed" medical space for the COVID death count as well as to "protect staff" and "maintain social distancing". The downside of this of course is that for everything other than the Cantonese Cough the population actually got sicker. The downside was presumably balanced by the upside as per the slew of Chief Medical Advisors (it wasn't, but that's incompetence on the part of the "expert class" of medical know-it-alls that worked to ban alternate views on social media rather than a failure to listen to other voices), but there were other side effects of public health policy besides just the medical ones.
Which is why it was entirely right of Premier Moe to listen to "Doctor" Shahab's list of suggestions and say yes to suggestions one and two, no to three through seven, yes to eight, no to nine, yes to ten through thirteen, no to fourteen through eighteen, yes to nineteen... and so on. It's probably not good policy to disclose what the list of original recommendations actually was, contrary to what Viro Fascist Dennis Kendel demanded. The upside is that Shahab would get to have an at-the-time politically popular boost in his social media impressions and get to show off his "stop COVID at all costs" bona fides in the press. The downside would be making it far more difficult to get public policy advisors in the future to be willing to be open and honest about their suggestions, and for the suggestions to be filtered through "what about when this gets out" lens which would overall diminish them. It would also mean advisors would be more motivated to only investigate and report on the upsides and not the downsides of their public policy suggestions.
It's a slightly extreme example, but policy makers can only openly evaluate suggestions when the best possible information is available to them. In the long term Shahab's suggestions being published, much like the suggestions were in the first place, cause more harm than good.
As for Viro Fascist Kendel's underlying argument: Let's say for example that Saskatchewan (who, like Alberta, doesn't currently) gets a Chief Economic Officer. If he had professional autonomy to issue Public Economy Orders, he would not issue an order to limit size of gatherings...except in the case of, say, union meetings in which case he would limit the size of those gatherings to ONE.
A Chief Economic Officer would, however, issue a Public Economy Order removing the provincial minimum wage, suspending a variety of environmental and national security regulations on the resource sectors, and ban all public and private sector unions.
Unless, of course, the government declined to follow his recommendations and instead look at all sides of the issue. They might look at "soft" or non-quantitative measurements: restricting union membership and activity, much like limiting the size of gatherings on private property, would impact on the fundamental human right to freedom of association. Other advisors would therefore weigh differently on the decision, leaving the government minister with the task assigned to him by Mrs. Thatcher of making the decision.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. This common saying wasn't popular with Viro Fascists over the past three years and you can imagine why. They had a singular goal: stop the spread of COVID. Even if every one of their suggestions would have worked (spoiler alert, they didn't), that still didn't make them the right decisions. Stopping the spread of COVID might have, I dunno, caused governments to run up trillions in debt with severe long term implications (or even short/medium term implications such as rampant inflation or something similarly unbelievable), or created a perverse set of incentives which would result in severe disruptions to the global supply chain, or foster a culture of government dependence with severe sociological implications for future generations, create a society based more on distrust than trust, or ironically left the population less healthy due to a general two year closure of avenues for preventative care and treatment.
Sure you could argue that the goal (COVID ends in the fall of 2020 and we never have to hear about it again) is worth it, but maybe it is and maybe it isn't. That's why it's so important that the final decision rests with Scott Moe and not with Dr. Shahab. It never can be only Shahab's decision, because he doesn't know or likely care about the ramifications of his decision outside of the healthcare field (as the post title notes).
Plus can you imagine if we did all or even most of the things these Chief Medical Officers demanded and on top of all of these unlikely-but-possible side effects the actions they took didn't even stop the spread of the WuFlu like they insisted it would??
