News
Around Red Deer May 8th…..
1:44 pm – Earl Dreeshen, Member of Parliament for Red Deer – Mountain View joined an all-party delegation in Washington from May 1-4. The meetings were broad in range but were primarily focused on issues relating to industry, science, and technology. Among the key items discussed were trade issues and how it affects industries on both sides of the border. Dreeshen and his colleagues met with Senators, Members of Congress, and various government and agency officials in this regard.
1:39 pm – The Smiles Thru Lindsey Foundation has committed $10,000 in funding that will go towards a Mental Health First Aid program at Red Deer Catholic Regional Schools (RDCRS). This training course will continue to help staff provide initial support to someone who may be developing a mental health problem or experiencing a mental health crisis. Read More.
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10:31 am – Good news to pass along regarding a missing Ponoka woman. RCMP say 22 year old Nikita Rabbit has now been located safe.
10:27 am – The City of Red Deer wants you to know the risks during Emergency Preparedness Week. Read More.
10:26 am – The Town of Innisfail is marking Emergency Preparedness Week with numerous events and activities. Read More.
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10:12 – Street sweeping resumes in the Town for All Seasons again today. Read More.
10:10 am – Attention Sylvan Lake gardeners! A Community Garden Meeting is taking place at the Sylvan Lake Family And Community Centre from 7:00 – 8:30 pm tonight. Read More.
10:02 am – Residential street sweeping continues in Lacombe today. Details here.
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9:54 am – It’s Emergency Preparedness Week. Officials with the Town of Blackfalds want to make sure you and your family are prepared. Find out here.
9:44 am – Residential sweeping will continue in Red Deer today on Grey Routes in the following neighbourhoods: Morrisroe Extension, Morrisroe, Sunnybrook, Anders Park, Anders Park East and Anders South. Click here for details.
9:33 am – So who’s responsible for mowing in Red Deer County? Find out here.
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9:08 am – Blackfalds RCMP have recovered some stolen property that includes an urn with cremated ashes inside. Read More.
8:47 am – A 33 year old Stettler man is facing charges after he was seen fishing from a small boat on Buffalo Lake on Saturday. Fish and Wildlife officials say fishing season is currently closed due to fish spawning and not opening until May 15th. Mounties remind the public that Impaired Driving laws also pertain to boats, off highway vehicles and any other recreational vehicles.
8:19 am – Grade 9 Badminton players from St. Francis of Assisi Middle School will be competing at the CWAJHAA’s today!
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8:11 am – In support of North American Occupational Safety and Health (NAOSH) Week, Grade 4 and 5 students at École Mother Teresa Catholic School in Sylvan Lake will observe today what happens when things go wrong for a distracted student involved in a parking lot collision. The mock incident takes place at 12:00 p.m.
8:04 am – RDC is excited to host students from across Western Canada, who will be attending the annual Alberta Band Association Provincial Festival of Bands from May 8 to 13 and May 15 to 18. About 7,000 Junior, Senior and Community Band students will participate in 10 days of performances, clinics and sight-reading activities.
7:59 am – Some Red Deer Public elementary school students have the chance once again to perform with a professional orchestra tonight! Show times for Choir Kids are 6:00 and 7:30 pm at the New Life Fellowship Church at 20 Kelloway Crescent.
| TOP LINE: | |||||||||||||||
| Super consumers of news are flocking to X and other platforms that support independent journalism, diverse voices and embrace transparency. The post election TV ratings abyss is driven both by technology and by the public’s loss of trust in Mainstream media. | |||||||||||||||
| DEEP DIVE: | |||||||||||||||
| To buy MSNBC or not to buy? | |||||||||||||||
| This week’s headline that Comcast will spin off its cable channels underscores the tectonic shift in the media marketplace and how technology is providing the exit ramp for competing platforms. | |||||||||||||||
| When my job as a senior investigative correspondent at CBS News was terminated in February, I took a few months to educate myself about the marketplace because so much had changed since I left Fox in 2019. What I found was genuinely surprising, a little frightening and, oddly, re-assuring for the strength of our democracy. | |||||||||||||||
| You can’t argue with the data. It is compelling. On Election Day, according to @Xdata, the platform boasted record usage of 942 million posts worldwide and 2.2 million hours of watch or listen time over approximately 160k live events. The X data crushed engagement numbers for the mainstream media (MSM.) | |||||||||||||||
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| By example, a Tucker Carlson interview on X has 35 million engagements. The CBS Evening News has 4.5 million viewers. If I had to choose, I’d take 30 million engagements on X because it represents explosive growth. | |||||||||||||||
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| The new super consumers of news are flocking to X and other platforms that support independent journalism, diverse voices, and embrace transparency which can strengthen democracy. This is nothing short of an industrial revolution driven both by technology and by loss of trust in corporate media. | |||||||||||||||
| In 2023, Human Rights lawyer Jacob Mchangama wrote about the upheaval and resulting, “elite panic.” | |||||||||||||||
| “Elite panic is this recurring phenomenon throughout the history of free speech, where whenever the public sphere is expanded, either through new communications technology, or to segments of the population that were previously marginalized, the traditional gatekeepers, the elites who control access to information, tend to fret about the dangers of allowing the unwashed mob — who are too fickle, too unsophisticated, too unlearned — unmediated access to information. They need information to be filtered through the responsible gatekeepers and it may be even more dangerous to allow them to speak without adult supervision. That’s a phenomenon that we see again and again. And we’re seeing it play out now on social media. … [Elite panic is] one contributing factor to the free speech recession.” | |||||||||||||||
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| If you asked me four years ago, if a presidential candidate could skip a 60 Minutes interview, I would have been skeptical. Four years later, candidate Trump bypassed the legacy news magazine and instead, sat down with Joe Rogan. As of this writing, the marathon sit-down viewership reached 51 million views. | |||||||||||||||
| There is no doubt Rogan is a skilled interviewer who can draw out his subjects and deliver huge audiences. Compared to heavily edited network TV reports, the raw, unedited format reveals much about the subject. In politics, the podcast is perfectly suited for the “beer question” which measures a candidate’s authenticity and likability. | |||||||||||||||
| The progressive Harris campaign took a more traditional media approach and came up short. Neither celebrity endorsements which feel less relevant nor a 60 Minutes interview seemed to move the needle. The combined audience of the 60 Minutes Kamala Harris interview and its views on YouTube landed at about 10 million, far less than what Rogan and X delivered. | |||||||||||||||
| The legacy of the Kamala Harris 60 Minutes interview is not her responses but the lingering controversy over the CBS’ interview edit. And that is where the public’s loss of trust in the media comes in. I believe this is another driver of the audience exodus. | |||||||||||||||
| CBS aired two different answers from the Vice President to the same question from correspondent Bill Whitaker about the Israeli Prime Minister apparently ignoring the Biden Administration. | |||||||||||||||
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| Since, a credible complaint has been filed at the FCC alleging “news distortion” at the network with a reasonable demand that the full, unedited Kamala Harris transcript be released. CBS News has said “it fairly presented the interview to inform the viewing audience and not to mislead it.” | |||||||||||||||
| In the October newsletter, I explained that releasing the full, unedited transcript would resolve these questions. There is ample precedent. | |||||||||||||||
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| As a senior investigative correspondent at CBS News, I interviewed President Trump at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. I advocated for and CBS News published the full, unedited transcript. | |||||||||||||||
| The CBS News Trump interview was not a special case. The full, unedited transcript from Attorney General Bill Barr’s 2019 interview with CBS chief legal affairs correspondent Jan Crawford was also shared by the network. And more recently, 60 Minutes released the full unedited transcript of its interview with Fed Chair Jerome Powell. | |||||||||||||||
| If the current trend continues, in the 2028 election cycle, the broadcast networks will firmly take a back seat to podcasts, town halls, and investigative journalism on X. For independent journalists and small digital newsrooms, the challenge is developing revenue streams that are viable. | |||||||||||||||
| In February, I was not comforted by the analogy that losing my corporate reporting job was like getting pushed off the Titanic when there were still seats in the lifeboats. In retrospect, I wonder if it may turn out to be more accurate than I initially thought. | |||||||||||||||
| After turning down job offers for which I remain grateful, I began building the Catherine Herridge Reports brand on X and in the newsletter marketplace. These platforms are the new media beachheads. Content is King. | |||||||||||||||
| I’ll have more to say about the future of journalism and why journalism is called a profession for a reason. Look for exclusive new content on media accountability in the coming days! | |||||||||||||||
| Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter and supporting independent investigative journalism! |
From the Fraser Institute
By Alex Whalen and Tegan Hill
Back in the summer at a meeting in Halifax, several provincial premiers discussed a lawsuit meant to force the federal government to make changes to Canada’s equalization program. The suit—filed by Newfoundland and Labrador and backed by British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Alberta—effectively argues that the current formula isn’t fair. But while the question of “fairness” can be subjective, its clear the equalization program is broken.
In theory, the program equalizes the ability of provinces to deliver reasonably comparable services at a reasonably comparable level of taxation. Any province’s ability to pay is based on its “fiscal capacity”—that is, its ability to raise revenue.
This year, equalization payments will total a projected $25.3 billion with all provinces except B.C., Alberta and Saskatchewan to receive some money. Whether due to higher incomes, higher employment or other factors, these three provinces have a greater ability to collect government revenue so they will not receive equalization.
However, contrary to the intent of the program, as recently as 2021, equalization program costs increased despite a decline in the fiscal capacity of oil-producing provinces such as Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Newfoundland and Labrador. In other words, the fiscal capacity gap among provinces was shrinking, yet recipient provinces still received a larger equalization payment.
Why? Because a “fixed-growth rule,” introduced by the Harper government in 2009, ensures that payments grow roughly in line with the economy—even if the gap between richer and poorer provinces shrinks. The result? Total equalization payments (before adjusting for inflation) increased by 19 per cent between 2015/16 and 2020/21 despite the gap in fiscal capacities between provinces shrinking during this time.
Moreover, the structure of the equalization program is also causing problems, even for recipient provinces, because it generates strong disincentives to natural resource development and the resulting economic growth because the program “claws back” equalization dollars when provinces raise revenue from natural resource development. Despite some changes to reduce this problem, one study estimated that a recipient province wishing to increase its natural resource revenues by a modest 10 per cent could face up to a 97 per cent claw back in equalization payments.
Put simply, provinces that generally do not receive equalization such as Alberta, B.C. and Saskatchewan have been punished for developing their resources, whereas recipient provinces such as Quebec and in the Maritimes have been rewarded for not developing theirs.
Finally, the current program design also encourages recipient provinces to maintain high personal and business income tax rates. While higher tax rates can reduce the incentive to work, invest and be productive, they also raise the national standard average tax rate, which is used in the equalization allocation formula. Therefore, provinces are incentivized to maintain high and economically damaging tax rates to maximize equalization payments.
Unless premiers push for reforms that will improve economic incentives and contain program costs, all provinces—recipient and non-recipient—will suffer the consequences.
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