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It should take a lot for us these days to be genuinely shocked by any politician’s tweets.

Perhaps in part because of other more aggressive UCP-aligned Twitter accounts, Premier Jason Kenney’s account doesn’t typically feature the sort of rhetoric that would raise many eyebrows. Last week was definitely the exception, though.

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In fact, I found myself going back multiple times to see if the tweet in question was still there. Surely they would delete it, I thought. It was not only embarrassing and beneath the dignity of the premier’s office, but it really puts a lie to much of what Kenney claimed about the extent of his support for harm reduction.

The premier has hinted at significant changes for supervised consumption sites and the role of harm reduction in addressing the opioid overdose crisis. Kenney has never really been an advocate of this approach, but he stressed last week that his government only intends to “see if there’s a better way of doing harm reduction.”

He then accused the previous government of having “an obsessive focus on so-called harm reduction,” which is a bizarre thing to say. What Kenney calls an “obsessive focus” was merely acquiescing to the repeated pleas from addiction experts and those working on the front lines to approve supervised consumption sites and hopefully stem the death toll from this crisis.