City Council voted to remove Molly Bannister Extension because 58%-42% was too close.

Garfield Marks

Published

5 years ago

6 minute read

THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS of people have made their positions clear. 58% said keep the Molly Bannister Extension and 42% said remove it.

Several councillors said it was too close to call. Quebec would have separated from Canada with 50%+1 vote. Councillor Lee asked for a plebiscite to get a clear number. The Red Deer Advocate did a poll and got the same ratio, again.

The City’s Mayor recused herself because she has a pecuniary interest, good for her. I think there should have been others follow suit after receiving a gift or donation from the developer in the past.

The end of the day, council voted to remove the road allowance and let it go to a public hearing. After thirty years, many votes, hearings, public meetings and thousands of responses even from the college asking that the connection remain it is going to another hearing on October 28.

This appears to be a desperation move to keep the game going until they get the score they need.

They know Sunnybrook is getting hammered by the traffic on 40Ave and by 32 St. which will be expanded to 6 lanes by 2026. Now they are talking about giving the new subdivision of approximately 2,000 residents another exit through Sunnybrook to 32 St. Councillor Handley mentioned it.

Bower subdivision doesn’t want the Molly Bannister Extension because of traffic for a couple of dozen homes on Molly Bannister. The rest of Bower will be on the other side of Bower Mall. The residents on the south side will be hammered by the increased traffic on 19 Street.

Hundreds and hundreds of homes will be getting hit by traffic increases all along 32 St. 19 St. and 40 Ave.

The traffic is bad now and the city has only increased in population by 195 people in five years. We are talking about in the future when our population hits 188,000 then more.

Red Deer College will be a University with a much larger student population traveling to the University on 32 St.

2 more high schools are planned for the east end, a new aquatic centre, twinning the Collicutt in the future. The traffic problems will be enormous.

It has been mentioned that hikers, bikers and skaters would have to use a crosswalk if the bridge is built, and it would only increase driving time by a couple of minutes.

We are talking about thousands upon thousands of drivers driving for a couple of extra minutes, every day. The emissions, from all that extra fuel, burned every day.

Neighbourhoods all along 19 Street, Neighbourhoods all 22 Street, Neighbourhoods all along 32 Street, Neighbourhoods all along 40 Ave and Neighbourhoods all along 30 Ave will be negatively affected.

So a developer can build 50 houses along Piper Creek in addition to the 700+ houses he planned if the extension remained. Admittedly they will be big fancy million dollar homes on Piper Creek.

50 families will enjoy nice fenced yards backing onto Piper Creek. While thousands of other people, have to deal with increased traffic noise.

This council knows that the bridge needs to be built but there are some who actually believe that removing it is the best option.

Ten years I would have agreed but today I have seen the results of a city being led by a few including developers and land speculators and I changed my mind. I live in Sunnybrook along the woods of Piper Creek. I have seen the changes, lost value in my house, lost use of the backyard to traffic noise. Been victimized by the homeless people living in those woods, Seen the tents, the garbage, the needles and the human waste.

I watched animals get killed trying to cross 32 St. at 10,000 cars per day, today’s 23,500 cars per day makes it almost impossible how about when traffic hits 45,000? 32 Street and 19 Streets will become insurmountable barriers.

The city is repairing 32 St near 47 Ave. today at a cost of 3 million because a foundation shifted. 32 St wasn’t meant for today’s traffic.

They talking of spending millions, widening 32 St to 6 lanes, spending millions widening 19 St to 6 lanes. They have mentioned a traffic circle at 40 Ave. and 19 St which could cost maybe 10s of millions. There is a question of a pedestrian bridge over 19 St. to get to Westerner at what 17 million?

All this so a developer can build 50 houses on Piper Creek. 50, onemillion dollar houses is a lot of money, but everyone else will be paying for it for along time.

I mentioned our population grew by only 195 people in 5 years, but in the same time we built 1290 homes. We have 800 kms of sidewalks many that have yet to see a home, and yet we cannot afford to maintain. So why do we want to build another 700-750 houses, add another km or 2 of sidewalk that we cannot maintain.

All this so a few rich people can become richer?

I am really beginning to think this council does not represent me or anyone I know. How about you?

Garfield Marks

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The city is growing? The population isn’t, so is it growing?

Garfield Marks / 3 years ago

Dear Council; Reinstate the Arterial Road connection from 22 St. & 40 Ave. to Molly Banister

Opinion / 3 years ago

Molly Banister extension is before council again on Monday for the umpteenth time. Exhausting.

Media

Carney speech highlights how easily newsrooms are played by politicians

Published on October 31, 2025

Todayville

The Rewrite

Peter Menzies

Plus! Global’s oops on Trump in the crosshairs and assuming what Stephen Harper thinks may not be the best idea!

It has never been easier, thanks to the internet, for journalists to check if they are being played for fools. But due either to sloth, neglect, habit or servility – pick one – way too many lack the motivation to use a search engine.

Instead, they frequently accept the role of featherheads manipulated by politicians staging one of the oldest scams in the Machiavellian playbook, the recycled “news” announcement. I say “featherheads” (patsies was another option) because, for instance, Prime Minister Mark Carney can book news network time for a full half hour speech that is nothing more than a rehash of everything he’s been saying for the past 10 months and still lead newscasts and make the front pages.

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Here, I must pause to credit the Toronto Star. It, like other news organizations, received an embargoed copy of Wednesday’s speech in advance. It read it, saw that it contained no news and did not put a report on its front page. Others such as National Post and the Globe and Mail tried desperately to find a fresh angle within the speech but put it on their front pages anyway. CBC threw everything it had into it and CTV also led with it and tried its best to make it sound like news had happened.

Now, I am a reasonable and fair-minded person, so I would not be reacting were it just this incident that captured my attention. The PM is speaking, everyone gets excited, you review and lock in your story lineup and, ya, I get it. Been there, done that. But this was part of a troubling pattern that has emerged.

For instance, the government’s “plan” to hire 1,000 more Canadian Border Services guards was first announced in the Liberal election platform last spring. It was then, according to Blacklock’s Reporter, re-announced “April 10, April 28, June 3 and August 12.”

That Blacklock’s report was published Oct. 14 and focused on Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree’s insistence he was “not responsible” for the promised hiring that hadn’t happened yet. Two days later, Carney announced that the previously announced and re-announced plan would be announced again in the Nov. 4 budget. And the day after that – Oct. 17 – Anandasangaree announced his ministry would be doing what he said a few days previously wasn’t his responsibility and hiring 1,000 new border guards – over the next five years. A similar pattern of announcement and reannouncements took place regarding the government’s plan to hire 1,000 more RCMP officers, also not immediately but eventually. Then, last week, Finance Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne announced a financial crimes agency would be up and running by next June. This, too, was reported as a new initiative even though the government first committed to that agency in 2021.

While not all news organizations rise to the bait, this widely carried Canadian Press story is an example of how easily the public can be misinformed by reporting that lacks proper context. Re-announcements are presented as “news” despite there being no news other than “politicians repeat what they said before to keep their names in the news.” Media that go along with this pattern of manipulation allow themselves to be accused of defining news as anything the government wishes to present as news, something about which – now that media are subsidized by politicians – they should be more cautious.

The nation needs journalists to tell the whole story or, as Robert Maynard, founder of the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, put it:

“The first thing about journalism is about accuracy and fairness, but that’s not enough. It has to be about context, it has to be about depth.”

Speaking of headlines, Global News deserves a long stare and shake of the head for the one it slapped on its report of the “No Kings” protests held last weekend.

Seemingly oblivious to the recent assassination of Charlie Kirk and two attempts on the life of US President Donald Trump, Global initially went with the above illustrated “Trump in the crosshairs” headline before changing it to “No Kings Day rallies draw hundreds of thousands of protesters.” The updated version made no reference to the initial version.

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There was quite a stir within the punditry when Dimitri Soudas, defrocked Conservative comms guy and former pal of notorious floor-crosser Eve Adams, wrote an op-ed for the Toronto Star criticizing party leader Pierre Poilievre. Rather than go with the disgruntled former employee angle, the Globe and Mail’s Larry Martin led the pack in leaping to a conclusion:

“Soudas wouldn’t have written this attack on Poilievre without Stephan (sic) Harper’s okay,” he posted. “It means the knives are out to get PP and they are big knives that could kill his leadership.”

Martin, who has had a very distinguished career, hadn’t confirmed what he assumed Harper was thinking and was quickly schooled by Anna Tomala, the former PM’s spokeswoman.

“Mr. Soudas does not speak on behalf of Mr. Harper,” she stated curtly.

Martin did not delete his original post but while to his credit he did post an update, it’s unclear his blushes were spared.

CTV, meanwhile, declined to include Tomala’s Harper statement in its report on Soudas’s op-ed.

Retired CTV reporter Alan Fryer, meanwhile, gave his past employer a blast on X after it delivered this headline: “Carney is going ‘where the puck is going to be’ in first trip to Asia as PM.”

Fryer’s world-weary response?

“My Lord, the headline. A leader couldn’t hope for a more compliant media.”

Finally, two commentators for news organizations were subjected to harm and intimidation last week and we learned that a third had been threatened in August. Terry Newman of National Post posted that she would be contacting police, Ezra Levant of Rebel News was laid out at a protest in Dublin and it was discovered that Brian Passifume of the Toronto Sun faced a death threat in August. I checked to see if the Canadian Association of Journalists (which has abandoned X) had something to say on their behalf. The CAJ’s most recent web post regarding abuse of journalists was on Sept. 25 in defence of Isaac Peltz of theindependent.ca and William Wilson, who writes for therover.ca.

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(Peter Menzies is a commentator and consultant on media, Macdonald-Laurier Institute Senior Fellow, a past publisher of the Calgary Herald, a former vice chair of the CRTC and a National Newspaper Award winner.)

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Business

Canada’s economic performance cratered after Ottawa pivoted to the ‘green’ economy

Published on October 31, 2025

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Jason Clemens and Jake Fuss

There are ostensibly two approaches to economic growth from a government policy perspective. The first is to create the best environment possible for entrepreneurs, business owners and investors by ensuring effective government that only does what’s needed, maintains competitive taxes and reasonable regulations. It doesn’t try to pick winners and losers but rather introduces policies to create a positive environment for all businesses to succeed.

The alternative is for the government to take an active role in picking winners and losers through taxes, spending and regulations. The idea here is that a government can promote certain companies and industries (as part of a larger “industrial policy”) better than allowing the market—that is, individual entrepreneurs, businesses and investors—to make those decisions.

It’s never purely one or the other but governments tend to generally favour one approach. The Trudeau era represented a marked break from the consensus that existed for more than two decades prior. Trudeau’s Ottawa introduced a series of tax measures, spending initiatives and regulations to actively constrain the traditional energy sector while promoting what the government termed the “green” economy.

The scope and cost of the policies introduced to actively pick winners and losers is hard to imagine given its breadth. Direct spending on the “green” economy by the federal government increased from $600 million the year before Trudeau took office (2014/15) to $23.0 billion last year (2024/25).

Ottawa introduced regulations to make it harder to build traditional energy projects (Bill C-69), banned tankers carrying Canadian oil from the northwest coast of British Columbia (Bill C-48), proposed an emissions cap on the oil and gas sector, cancelled pipeline developments, mandated almost all new vehicles sold in Canada to be zero-emission by 2035, imposed new homebuilding regulations for energy efficiency, changed fuel standards, and the list goes on and on.

Despite the mountain of federal spending and regulations, which were augmented by additional spending and regulations by various provincial governments, the Canadian economy has not been transformed over the last decade, but we have suffered marked economic costs.

Consider the share of the total economy in 2014 linked with the “green” sector, a term used by Statistics Canada in its measurement of economic output, was 3.1 per cent. In 2023, the green economy represented 3.6 per cent of the Canadian economy, not even a full one-percentage point increase despite the spending and regulating.

And Ottawa’s initiatives did not deliver the green jobs promised. From 2014 to 2023, only 68,000 jobs were created in the entire green sector, and the sector now represents less than 2 per cent of total employment.

Canada’s economic performance cratered in line with this new approach to economic growth. Simply put, rather than delivering the promised prosperity, it delivered economic stagnation. Consider that Canadian living standards, as measured by per-person GDP, were lower as of the second quarter of 2025 compared to six years ago. In other words, we’re poorer today than we were six years ago. In contrast, U.S. per-person GDP grew by 11.0 per cent during the same period.

Median wages (midpoint where half of individuals earn more, and half earn less) in every Canadian province are now lower than comparable median wages in every U.S. state. Read that again—our richest provinces now have lower median wages than the poorest U.S. states.

A significant part of the explanation for Canada’s poor performance is the collapse of private business investment. Simply put, businesses didn’t invest much in Canada, particularly when compared to the United States, and this was all pre-Trump tariffs. Canada’s fundamentals and the general business environment were simply not conducive to private-sector investment.

These results stand in stark contrast to the prosperity enjoyed by Canadians during the Chrétien to Harper years when the focus wasn’t on Ottawa picking winners and losers but rather trying to establish the most competitive environment possible to attract and retain entrepreneurs, businesses, investors and high-skilled professionals. The policies that dominated this period are the antithesis of those in place now: balanced budgets, smaller but more effective government spending, lower and competitive taxes, and smart regulations.

As the Carney government prepares to present its first budget to the Canadian people, many questions remain about whether there will be a genuine break from the policies of the Trudeau government or whether it will simply be the same old same old but dressed up in new language and fancy terms. History clearly tells us that when governments try to pick winners and losers, the strategy doesn’t lead to prosperity but rather stagnation. Let’s all hope our new prime minister knows his history and has learned its lessons.