Alberta United Conservative Party MLA Peter Guthrie made a request to his own party’s government on Wednesday to eliminate its vaccine passport system.
“We are now approaching two years dealing with COVID, and the time is well upon us to make a life beyond restrictions,” said Guthrie in a Facebook video. “To move away from divisive policies and begin healing this province.”
Guthrie said the Omicron variant is making people realize COVID-19 is subsiding, which “provides a renewed sense of hope.” He said it has become apparent that unvaccinated and vaccinated people can both transmit COVID-19.
Guthrie said vaccine passports should end for multiple reasons, foremost the division they have created. He said the passport system has caused “animosity, even among the closest of friends and families.”
Medical privacy is another reason Guthrie gave for ending the passports, with such information “an area that was always without question previously protected.”
The third reason, he said, is that vaccine passports are expensive for businesses to implement, “causing numerous conflicts with owners and their customers and limiting their clientele.”
Guthrie said that if Alberta wanted to claim that they do not have a vaccine mandate, removing vaccine passports would be “an excellent first step in our transition away from restrictions.”
He said that Alberta needs to learn from its mistakes and that the government has to stop claiming the policy works.
He encouraged Alberta to take the lead.
“Vaccine passports are the epitome of leftist identity politics,” he said. “Removing them will come with outrage from the opposition and gaslighting from the media, but it is the right thing to do.”
Guthrie broke ranks with his colleagues in September by criticizing the Alberta government for bringing back mask mandates and offering financial incentives for people to get their COVID shots.
