CALGARY, Alberta (LifeSiteNews) – Nearly 500 people took to the streets of Calgary on picnic blankets Sunday to protest the COVID-19 vaccine passports now required of restaurants and other businesses in Alberta.
“This is our protest because all the businesses in Alberta have denied access to unvaccinated people. So we have taken it to the streets and have created our own picnics. We have empty patios, busy streets,” explained one attendee, who walked along Stephen Avenue in downtown Calgary to film the protest.
Her footage showed a street jam-packed with picnicking protestors, including many families with children, as did other footage of the event shared on Facebook. Propped-up protest signs could be seen, one of which read, “No vaccine passports! Truth not Trudeau. Stop the Tyranny.” Another sign used the word COVID as an acrostic, spelling out: “Comply – Obey – Vaccinate – Indoctrinate – Depopulate.”
The YouTube channel that shared the footage also shares videos of COVID lockdown and vaccine passport protest footage from Paris, Israel, Sydney, the United Kingdom, Berlin, and Bangkok, including footage of Paris’ own vaccine passport protest picnics.
A Calgary picnic protest participant, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of losing her job, told the Western Standard, “We’re tired of it. We’re tired of no firm answers, no real research to show these (vaccines) are safe.”
One Twitter user commented on a tweet displaying the event, “We’re vaxxed and won’t spend a dime in a place that requires papers.”
A few have noted that media reporting of the Calgary protest has been scant. One Facebook user remarked, in response to video footage of the event, “Don’t see it in the news…. so they are scared to show the courage of the people…..”
On September 15, Alberta Premier Jason Kenney introduced a COVID-19 vaccine passport program under the title “Restriction Exemption Program,” to be implemented for “certain non-essential activities.”
Under the new vaccine passport, businesses that fall under the restrictions have two options: they can either take part in the program which will require proof of vaccination, a negative result for an approved COVID-19 test, or an “original vaccine medical exemption letter” — and operate as “usual” — or they must restrict their capacity size.
However, only COVID tests from a pharmacy will be allowed to be used as proof, which cost $40 each on average. Restaurants that choose not to go along with the program are banned from having in-person dining.
Kenney announced the decision during a press conference in which he declared Alberta to be in a state of emergency due to high intensive-care unit rates, and speculated that Alberta “may run out of staffed intensive care beds within the next ten days.”
Rebel News chief Ezra Levant called Alberta’s strain on hospital resources combined with the closing of ICU beds a “manufactured” crisis, overseen by Tyler Shandro, the Alberta Minister of Health. Levant shared data on Twitter taken from Alberta’s own government website showing that Shandro had “closed 20% of ICU beds this year.”
Alberta’s disgraced health minister @shandro is threatening Albertans because of the number of ICU beds with Covid patients. But according to his own department, Shandro has closed 20% of ICU beds this year. He literally manufactured this “crisis”. Source: https://t.co/UdW6QM7sq1 https://t.co/3AlnGaEcVn pic.twitter.com/oWxF2pF6fq
— Ezra Levant 🍁 (@ezralevant) September 3, 2021
President of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF) John Carpay also blasted Kenney for his government’s failure to not increase hospital bed capacity in a statement shared with LifeSiteNews.
“Premier Jason Kenney has been fearmongering for 18 months about Alberta running out of intensive care beds and staff to manage Covid patients, yet his government continues to fail to increase health care capacity,” he said. “Seventeen months after announcing the increase of ICU capacity, the government has still failed to do so.”
While announcing the new measures, Kenney claimed Alberta was undergoing a “crisis of the unvaccinated,” despite a University of Oxford study showing that the vaccinated carry similar levels of viral load to the unvaccinated, thus demonstrating that vaccines cannot prevent transmission of COVID.
Some have also called Alberta’s claimed COVID case rates into question after Alberta’s Chief Medical Officer of Health, Deena Hinshaw, shared during a Thursday press conference that any student who stays home with an illness is automatically associated with COVID and counted as being part of the outbreak.
Referring to the framework in place to manage “outbreaks” in schools, Hinshaw said, “If individuals choose to not get tested for COVID but are home with an illness, they are now counted in the list as being part of that outbreak, and so it’s less dependent on needing a test to be a part of identifying where there is an issue.”
Leader of the People’s Party of Canada Maxime Bernier blasted Kenney’s newest restrictions, tweeting earlier this month, “Jason Kenney has just declared war on our Charter of rights and freedoms. I will be in Alberta this weekend for the last stretch of the election campaign to join Albertans in their fight against this despot.”
LifeSiteNews has produced an extensive COVID-19 vaccines resources page. View it here.