Premier Andrew Furey is revealing more information about the modelling he used to determine whether or not it was safe to call an election last January.

At yesterday’s COVID-19 briefing, Dr. Proton Rahman revealed that he had met with the Premier for what he calls “general overviews” prior to the writ being dropped, but was not involved in the modelling Furey used.

Further, Dr. Rahman revealed that we did not have enough cases at the time to do predictive modelling.

The Premier explains that he looked at the probability of three different scenarios: one in which our low case numbers would continue, one where they used data from the federal government based on other provinces, and another where community spread happened due to the active cases we had at the time.

Furey says he assigned probabilities to each scenario, and it was the second scenario that leads him to believe there could be outbreaks later in the year.

The Premier denies that there is a lack of transparency regarding the data used.

Furey says all the data they used is publicly available. Further, he explains that at the time we had very little cases, and with the absence of cases it is hard to model.

Meanwhile, PC leader Ches Crosbie is accusing Premier Andrew Furey of misleading the public regarding how he reached his decision to hold a provincial election.

Crosbie challenges the Premier’s assertion that he consulted modelling to determine whether to drop the writ.

He insists that there was no modelling to say it was safe to run an election—and that it was a ‘back of the envelope’ attempt to sketch out different scenarios.

Premier Furey indicated that he reviewed publicly-available information from the federal government’s COVID-19 data to guide his decision, but Crosbie calls the explanation illogical.

Crosbie says the country was well into its second wave, and that Canada reported its single highest case count in the days leading up to the election call.