Preston Manning's fiction made real in his Alberta pandemic report

Preston Manning's report on the government's COVID response concluded that emergency management agencies should lead over the health department, demanded economic impact assessments for any health protections and criticized the courts' deference to "demonstrably justifiable" limits on freedoms.

You might think we're referring to the panel report Manning was commissioned to lead for Alberta's government. You'd be partly right.

The former Reform Party leader had also made these recommendations before.

Last year, before Premier Danielle Smith appointed him to study the pandemic response, Manning dabbled in creative writing on the topic. And covered much of the same ground, albeit in fiction.

Before Manning's real Public Health Emergencies Governance Review Panel of 2023, there was his imagined COVID Commission of 2023. 

To read both is to behold the fantasy evolve into reality. Although the Smith government gave him a panel and a $2-million budget for research and support — they also endowed him with the restraints of reality, one supposes — many conclusions essentially remained the same.

In mid-2022, Manning wrote his Report of the COVID Commission, June 5, 2023 for the conservative-leaning Frontier Centre for Public Policy, a think tank that's been largely critical of governments' handling of COVID.

This first report was 46 pages — once promised as an audiobook — billed as a "fictional, futuristic description" of a public investigation of pandemic management, and the imagined events that both led to that commission and followed it. But he was explicit that his objective was "non-fictional": to explore the likelihood citizens would demand such an inquiry, and to "imagine in considerable detail the conclusions, recommendations, and lessons which would result from such an investigation."

The former politician envisaged an inquiry into the federal response, rather than by any provincial government. This adds to how striking it is that there's such overlap between the imagined national review and the actual provincial one. 

It's one thing to have thematic similarities in terms of Manning's criticism of dominant scientific viewpoints and public health approaches — his Alberta panel bemoans governments and the media for "disregarding and censoring other narratives," while his work of non-taxpayer-funded fiction says those groups "ruthlessly and systematically censored and 'cancelled'" such perspectives. This is rhetoric and conjecture, of the sort Manning was using on this topic well before he penned either document.

It's another matter, however, for the actual findings to be consistent between real report and make-believe.

Before delving into them, let's go through an admittedly weird exercise of comparing an actual commission's methodology with a fantasy one. 

Manning's fictional panel, not sanctioned by the Trudeau government and composed of never-named experts, had a broad mandate to probe the pandemic and "freedom convoy" protest, and held public hearings.

The one Alberta's premier commissioned was chaired by Manning and boasted former Supreme Court justice John Major and economist Jack Mintz. It was assigned to appraise the legislation and government practices surrounding health emergencies, and was conducted without any open hearings but did offer a one-question online survey as public engagement.