Opinion
Ponoka’s Muliplex is a go,adding to Penhold, Blackfalds, and Lacombe to bolster recreation in Central Alberta. Where’s Red Deer?
Ponoka Multiplex is going ahead. Ponoka, population 7,229, is going to spend $16.6 million or $2,296 per person on a recreational multiplex, to service residents and attract growth. Great news.
Penhold Multiplex was a huge success in both regards. Penhold, population 3,277 spent $23 million or $7,018 per person and the town grew and they needed more land.
Blackfalds spent $15.2 million on the Abbey Centre and are looking to spend another $12 million on a second covered ice rink, for a total of $27.2 million. Blackfalds population 9328, will be spending $2,916 per resident on recreation.
Sylvan Lake has the new Nexsource Centre multiplex. Sylvan Lake, population 14,816 spent $33.5 million or $2,264 per person on a recreational complex.
Lacombe is spending $13,668,141 upgrading their sports complex. Lacombe population 13,057 means $1,047 per person for upgrading.
This means that 47,700 people are putting out $102 million for recreation complexes. These are growing communities looking to attract more growth. This growth has been partially from Red Deer residents migrating away from Red Deer. Red Deer’s population shrank between 2015-2016. Their own polls shows they shrank by a 1,000 residents but the federal census puts it only 400 residents less. The area north of the river shrank by 777 residents alone. There are still about 30,000 residents living north of the river.
They have only one recreational complex, over 30 years old. If the city was to step up to the plate and treat the residents on par with the smaller communities they would need to spend $64 million on recreational facilities north of the river.
If the city as a whole wanted to be equal to these smaller communities then they would have to spend $214 million dollars on recreational facilities. To compare with Penhold, the city would have to spend $700 million but Blackfalds is one of the fastest growing communities in Canada. To match their per capita spending the city of Red Deer would have to commit $292 million on recreational facilities.
Lethbridge, the third fastest growing city in Alberta and nearest in size to Red Deer recently committed $109 million for phase 2 of their recreation centre. Again to attract young families, a necessity for growth. Remember Lethbridge once turned a man-made slough into a lake and created Henderson Lake Park around it. It may be why they are the 5th fastest growing city in Canada behind Regina, Saskatoon, Edmonton and Calgary.
Red Deer was once a hub for Central Alberta, now it cannot keep pace with Penhold, Blackfalds, Ponoka, Lacombe, Sylvan Lake, as they grow and seek out new possibilities.
The last big project in Red Deer was the Collicutt Center in Red Deer’s south east, that was 15 years ago and the city grew, that area developed, and noone is saying now that the Collicutt Centre was a bad idea.
We are opening up land in the northwest corner, thousands of acres, room for 25,000 residents and Red Deer’s largest lake, Hazlett Lake. 55,000 residents north of the river, the same population as when they decided to build a 4th recreational centre now known as the Collicutt Centre.
Red Deer needs to build a 50m pool, and the north side needs new recreational facilities, and our Collicutt Centre was such a huge success in spurring growth, why not build a Northside Collicutt Centre with a 50m pool and ice rink on Hazlett Lake?
Red Deer could be a sports hub, a tourist hub and an economic hub, once again. The proof is t5here, we just need the courage. If we do not have it now maybe we can find it before the municipal election this coming October. We just need to ask. I am asking but I am getting the run around, which could be why everyone else is growing and we are shrinking. What do you think? Let me know. Thank you.
From the Fraser Institute
In the minds of most Canadians, there’s little connection between housing affordability and productivity growth, a somewhat wonky term used mainly by economists. But in fact, the connection is very real.
To improve affordability, the Trudeau government recently announced various financing programs to encourage more investment in residential housing including $6 billion for the Canada Housing Infrastructure Fund and $15 billion for an apartment construction loan program.
Meanwhile, Carolyn Rogers, senior deputy governor of the Bank of Canada, recently said weak business investment is contributing to Canada’s weak growth in productivity (essentially the value of economic output per hour of work). Therefore, business investment to promote productivity growth and income growth for workers is also an economic priority.
But here’s the problem. There’s only so much financial capital at reasonable interest rates to go around.
Because Canada is a small open economy, it might seem that Canadian investors have unlimited access to offshore financial capital, but this is not true. Foreign lenders and investors incur foreign exchange risk when investing in Canadian-dollar denominated assets, and the risk that Canadian asset values will decline in real value. Suppliers of financial capital expect to receive higher yields on their investments for taking on more risk. Hence, investment in residential housing (which the Trudeau government wants to promote) and investment in business assets (which the Bank of Canada warns is weak) compete against each other for scarce financial capital supplied by both domestic and foreign savers.
For perspective, investment in residential housing as a share of total investment increased from 22.4 per cent in 2000 to 41.3 per cent in 2021. Over the same period, investment in two asset categories critical to improving productivity—information and communications equipment and intellectual property products including computer software—decreased from 30.3 per cent of total domestic investment in 2000 to 22.7 per cent in 2021.
What are the potential solutions?
Of course, more financial capital might be available at existing interest rates for domestic investment in residential housing and productivity-enhancing business assets if investment growth declines in other asset categories such as transportation, roads and hospitals. But these assets also contribute to improved productivity and living standards.
Regulatory and legal pressures on Canadian pension funds to invest more in Canada and less abroad would also free up domestic savings for increased investments in residential housing, machinery and equipment and intellectual property products. But this amounts to an implicit tax on Canadians with domestic pension fund holdings to subsidize other investors.
Alternatively, to increase domestic savings, governments in Canada could increase consumption taxes (e.g. sales taxes) while reducing or even eliminating capital gains taxes, which reduce the after-tax expected returns to investing in businesses, particularly riskier new and emerging domestic companies. (Although according to the recent federal budget, the Trudeau government plans to increase capital gains taxes.)
Or governments could reduce the regulatory burden on private-sector businesses, especially small and medium-sized enterprises, so financial capital and other inputs used to comply with often duplicative or excessive regulation can be used to invest in productivity-enhancing assets. And governments could eliminate restrictions on foreign investment in large parts of the Canadian economy including telecommunications, banking and transportation. By increasing competition, governments can improve productivity.
Eliminating such restrictions would also arguably increase the supply of foreign financial capital flowing into Canada to the extent that large foreign investors would prefer to manage their Canadian assets rather than take portfolio investment positions in Canadian-owned companies.
Canadians would undoubtedly benefit from increases in housing construction (and subsequently, increased affordability) and improved productivity from increased business investment. However, government subsidies to home builders, including the billions recently announced by the Trudeau government, simply move available domestic savings from one set of investments to another. The policy goal should be to increase the availability of risk-taking financial capital so the costs of capital decrease for Canadian investors.
Author:
“Take out the papers and the trash, or you don’t get no spending cash.”
Whether you’re in the stock market or real estate the question of when to sell is paramount. When to dump a tanking investment or sell a house in a bad market is an art form. Hence the expression, Timing is everything.
For the incumbent governments in Canada and the U.S. the time has come to make that risky decision of when to fish or when to cut bait with their respective leaders.
In Canada the federal Liberals, still shacked up with the NDP in a common-law embrace, have been doing denial for an extended period since they used the Covid-19 lockdown to sneak out a minority government in 2021. As soon as voters awoke to the lockdown hoax they’d lived through— courtesy of Justin Trudeau— they began to abandon him as a marketable product.
With five years to procrastinate, however, they indulged their radical agenda of climate and culture rather than address how they might be re-elected with Trudeau and his Quebec-dominated cabinet. They blew black holes in Canada’s debt load. There was a PR strategy to label Pierre Poilievre as a mini-Trump. And to buy up the floundering legacy media sources before there 2025 vote.
But for the most part the Liberals still saw Happy Ways where the mainstream saw an intellectual lightweight tilting at every Woke windmill. Since 2021 the polls have shown a steady erosion to the point where they see a Conservative majority— maybe even super-majority— if an election were called today.
Now all governments get tired over time. The biggest complaint about Stephen Harper from the talking classes in 2015 was the sense of fatigue he projected to Canadians who want their PM to be a rock star. But the collapse in Trudeau’s support has come via other very serious underpinnings from corruption (Lavalin, ME Charity, Chinese influence) to entitlement (the Carbon Tax, deficit).
However you see these issues they have led to the point where Liberals, more than half of whom will lose in the next election, must decide if they want to go to Davy Jones locker on the HMCS Skippy. Many of them will qualify for federal pensions if they hold on to the bitter end with Trudeau in October of next year. So he has that assurance of support. But if he is punted by the party he resurrected in 2010, who will succeed him? The taint of Trudeau on his most loyal sycophants will disqualify anyone in cabinet from being taken seriously for the top job.
Outside the immediate junta, names like Mark Carney— former Bank of Canada head— and deposed justice minister Jody Wilson Raybould have been put forward. The problem for anyone aspiring to replace Trudeau is they will have to face his fanatical loyalists in the PMO who’ve slapped down any pretenders so far.
The most recent forlorn hope for Trudeau was that the Federal Budget might calm the waters. Running up the deficit to perilous numbers with a menu of profligate policies to slake the restless NDP was going to force Poilievre on the defensive. So were limp attacks such as this from Trudeau cabinet pal Marc Miller.
For a brief fortnight the polling seemed to stabilize. But now more recent polls show that Trudeau’s popularity bottom was not a bottom at all, just a transfer station en route to the Marianas Trench of politics. Leaving the question of who and when as the only measurables in the equation. How much runway does he deserves and how much his successor gets are the operative problems when Liberals spend the summer in their ridings.
Meanwhile Joe Biden’s faint hope of putting his opponent in jail before the November election has done nothing to move his polling. If anything the prosecution of Donald Trump as he runs against Biden in 2024 is seen as a distinctly underhanded tactic by many outside the MSNBC mouth breathers.
While polls are a mugs’ game, the news that Biden trails Trump in all seven of the swing states he needs to be re-elected has sent shock through Team Obama, which runs the Democratic Party at the moment. There are a lot of sinecures and cushy salaries at risk here. The addition of Robert Kennedy Jr. to the presidential ballot in key states like California is further diluting the DEMs base. While RFK Jr. draws from both parties it’s expected he’ll hurt Biden most.
As if that wasn’t enough the recent pro-Palestine occupations by students and paid agitators is seen as a referendum on Biden’s support for Israel among the fanatical left-wing base of the DEMs. And polls indicate the effect has been disastrous.
Unlike the Liberals who have time to effect a palace coup, the DEMs are up against the clock with their convention coming in July. While he still plays to the Hollywood and Wall Street donors, the general public sees Biden getting more decrepit by the day. His persona as a pleasantly dazed crossing guard has worn thin.
While replacement scenarios have dogged Biden since his election (saved only by the utter dislike for his VP Kamala Harris) the party pros are talking about one last pierce of theatre: letting Biden take the nomination in July, replace Harris with a star candidate like Michelle Obama or Tom Hanks and have Biden then take a knee for health reasons.
Let the untainted replacement take on Trump, who produces a puke-in-your-mouth reaction with half the American electorate. A squishy Obama/ Bill Clinton replacement could rout Trump in a debate and bring single white women and blacks/ latinos back home to the DEMs. Seems like a longshot?
This is the party that orchestrated at least four separate legal assaults on Trump, coincidentally in the year of the election. Don’t under-estimate their chicanery. And while they didn’t pay off the media as Trudeau has done, they don’t need to. They get the love for free.
Give them credit if they do, because doing nothing is a ticket to four years of The Don.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. Now for pre-order, new from the team of Evan & Bruce Dowbiggin . Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL & Changed Hockey. From Espo to Boston in 1967 to Gretz in L.A. in 1988 to Patrick Roy leaving Montreal in 1995, the stories behind the story. Launching in paperback and Kindle on #Amazon this week. Destined to be a hockey best seller. https://www.amazon.ca/Deal-Trades-Stunned-Changed-Hockey-ebook/dp/B0D236NB35/
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