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Beautiful downtown restaurant and gift shop turning to community to survive Covid-19

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This GoFundMe request is indicative of the atmosphere so many small businesses have been forced to try to endure for the last two long years.  

Here’s an opportunity for people who love these particular businesses to have the opportunity to save them.

From GoFundMe

Tribe & Sunworks Need your Help

It’s time for us to ask even though this is extremely uncomfortable. We have exhausted all of our other options. Sunworks and Tribe need your help to keep open until life returns to some sort of normal. We’ve set up this GoFundMe page with the hope that you’ll come to our rescue. Please consider giving to help us through what we all hope is the end of the pandemic.
What follows is our story of our struggle to survive, while so many of our fellow retailers and restaurateurs haven’t. This industry has been especially hard hit, and in many ways overlooked in policy and funding decisions. We know you have watched us, supported us when you could, and had us in your thoughts as the community wrestled to keep everyone safe and healthy.

Here’s our story.

In 2019 Tribe and Sunworks were both in the process of restructuring and expanding, when everything went sideways at the start of 2020.
Sunworks
Sunworks sold most of its inventory and moved in March of 2019 to its new location on Little Gaetz. What remained, our customers and friends carried by hand in a long fire line from our old location to the new one. 2019 our revenues were sparse as we worked to rebuild our inventory and adapt to our new space. This is important to note because it is the 2019 figures that all the COVID-19 grants were based upon. By the end of the year Sunworks was up and running in our new place but still working to rebuild the business. Things were steadily improving in spite of the economy, which you will recall was pretty flat.
COVID struck in the beginning of 2020 and we did our best to adapt. We used our closed time to build an online shop and to install a takeout food counter so that when we were able to reopen we would have improved services and hopefully multiple streams of revenue. With only one employee we worked to keep the store alive through online sales. She did a fantastic job and you supported us through the first couple of months of shutdown.
We used the government loan funds to help us with these projects and those at Tribe. Funds went to the staff to keep some of them employed and also for the building costs to improve the space.
Most recently, the Omicron wave has by far been the most difficult for us, striking our business in what should have been the busiest season of the year. Sales were down about 60K for the shopping season, which is typically the time we make it or break it.
Tribe
As you know restaurants and bars suffered a lot more than retail and other industries. We had longer periods of closure and restrictions. We were unable to keep many of the staff employed but did what we could to help them. We hired, trained, and reopened no matter how limited after each shutdown. It became a cycle of layoffs, retraining, and adapting. Quite exhausting for everyone.
In 2019 Tribe was expanding and taking on new liabilities as we doubled the size of the space with the long term vision to build what is now Tribe River Bar. During the shutdowns and restrictions we used the time to make renovations and improvements as best we could. We tried to adapt for ‘online, curbside, and delivery’, but quickly discovered that our customers, although they loved our food, were coming for the ambiance and romance of the room itself. We had limited success with the strategy even though we tried multiple apps.
The Omicron wave hit Tribe with equal force. Christmas parties and celebrations were postponed, and the new year was very minimal. We did what we could with the workforce we had. There were days that we had more cancellations than bookings. Revenue was a quarter of what it should have been. It made the preparation and planning nearly impossible.  There has been a lot of food wasted during the restriction. All of this created chaos and hardship for the staff.  Our most loyal staff are hanging on with faith and hope.
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As we progressed with the pandemic we didn’t qualify for many of the grants, because most were based on 2019 revenue numbers and our businesses were expanding, taking on new lease/mortgage commitment or debt to grow prior to the pandemic. Although business was down in 2020 and 2021 compared to 2019, it wasn’t enough to reach the threshold for grant approval. Expenses were not considered. Growing businesses across the country fell through the cracks with the funding program with the exception of new debt. We are liquidating what we can to minimize the growing debt. The workload this created for business owners like us was unsustainable. Almost daily we were forced to choose among the most urgent tasks to leave for the next day.
Our local bank has been exceptional in helping us through some of the worst times by postponing payments. This added to the future debt owing but at least it allowed us to operate.
Which brings us to today. We have exhausted all of the options we had to keep our heads above water. We’ve delayed payments to CRA (which is never a good thing), refinanced everything we can, limited labour hours and cut costs wherever we could and held off mortgage payments. Omicron has created such uncertainty among the public who are growing weary of the pandemic, who don’t want to get sick nor spread the virus any further. The weather has been too cold to encourage restaurant bookings. Add this to a very weak Christmas and New Year season, which normally supports us through until the warm weather in April, and we’ve reached the end of our rope.
Here is what we are proposing.
During the course of the pandemic, we have had numerous customers call or comment to ask how they can help, offering money to support the utilities or other expenses. We have up until this point have appreciated the calls of support but have struggled onward. We expected the situation to improve more quickly and we certainly worked hard to set ourselves up to succeed once life returns to some sense of normal.
Our commitment to you is that if you fund us now, once we are back on our feet and revenue has recovered, we will make contributions to the Red Deer and District Community Foundation to assist in other community needs in the future. We have no idea whether our asking for help will be met with respect or with the good intent we mean. We are grateful for everyone that has supported us over the years and particularly through this pandemic crisis. If you can help now it will mean a lot to us.
9,565 raised of $25,000 goal
58 donations

Updates (2)

Todayby Terry Warke, Organizer
Thank you you everyone for your support. We are 36% of the way. We appreciate everyone’s efforts. Please feel free to share this campaign with those whom you think would want to know and help. We are hoping that by the end of next week we’ll reach the goal and can begin to address some of the issues that have accumulated over the past two years. Also, thank you to many of you who have come to shop for Valentine’s day or who have made reservations at Tribe. We are feeling the strength and support of our community and this gives us hope. As always please give us a call or stop in if you would like to. chat. Paul and Terry.
Organizer
Paul Harris
Organizer
Red Deer, AB

After 15 years as a TV reporter with Global and CBC and as news director of RDTV in Red Deer, Duane set out on his own 2008 as a visual storyteller. During this period, he became fascinated with a burgeoning online world and how it could better serve local communities. This fascination led to Todayville, launched in 2016.

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RFK Jr. warns Americans ‘will be slaves’ if central bank digital currency is established

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From LifeSiteNews

By Doug Mainwaring

The U.S. presidential candidate cited the Freedom Convoy trucker protests in Canada when the government ‘was able to destroy their lives’ by freezing bank accounts.

Democrat presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. declared in no uncertain terms recently that establishing a Central Bank Digital Currency in the country will be “the end of freedom; we will be slaves if we allow that to happen.”

In a wide-ranging discussion at the University of Austin about freedom of speech and civil discourse, Kennedy said he didn’t “get” the connection between CBDCs and the loss of freedom of expression and other freedoms until he witnessed the Canadian trucker protest.

“The truckers in Canada were protesting the COVID mandates, the lockdowns, masking mandates, vaccination mandates, and others,” Kennedy began. “They started in Alberta. They picked up thousands of trucks as they drove across Canada to Ottawa.”

When they got to Ottawa — they were trying to petition Prime Minister Trudeau — and they were exercising a right that we all take for granted in this country: the right to assemble, the right to protest, the right to petition their government, and the government instead condemned them as right-wing fascists and racists, which if you look at the videos, they’re the opposite. Looks like Woodstock. They were delivering bottled water, they were cooking food for the poor, they were picking up garbage. There were musicians on every block.

It was really a beautiful thing.

However, the Trudeau government perceived the protesters to be an existential threat.

“The government used facial recognition systems and other intrusive technologies to identify the participants,” he recounted, and weaponized that information against them to freeze their bank accounts so they couldn’t purchase diesel for their trucks, buy food for their kids, or pay their mortgages or rents.

A pivotal moment for Kennedy occurred when one of the truckers told him that because of the government’s action, he was going to go to jail because he couldn’t pay his alimony.

He said that transactional freedom is as important as freedom of the press, or freedom of speech, “because if you have freedom of speech in the First Amendment and yet when you exercise that speech — if the government doesn’t like it — they can starve you to death. They can throw you out of your home.”

They keep a social credit score on you so that if (for instance) you’ve got your mask off below your nose, or if you’re not social distancing properly, or if you violate some other social norm, you get penalties taken off your social (credit) score and at some point they punish you.

Penalized persons are then limited to buying groceries from “stores that are within a certain radius of your house. You can’t buy gas. You can’t buy an airplane ticket. You can’t buy anything else, so you’re basically under home confinement.”

The truckers in Canada were never charged with a crime. They were certainly never convicted. It was just (that) they were doing something the government didn’t like.

So the government was able to destroy their lives, and that is a very dangerous power to give government. And that’s why I’m against Central Bank Digital Currencies because that is part of the path to getting us where China is today.

That’s where they started. That’s where all these other countries … with a Central Bank Digital Currency (started). And it’s the end of freedom. We will be slaves if we allow that to happen.

Kennedy is far from alone in his alarm over the prospect of a CBDC being introduced in the U.S. or Canada.

Although digital currency offers some attractive features, it also would grant the federal government unlimited opportunity to weaponize the technology against citizens, allowing it to both spy on the spending habits of everyday Americans and block access to the money in their personal bank accounts.

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz introduced the CBDC Anti-Surveillance State Act last month to prohibit the Federal Reserve from issuing a central bank digital currency that Republican sponsors of the bill believe could turn the nation into a “surveillance state” by handing over control of personal finances to federal government agencies.

“The Biden administration salivates at the thought of infringing on our freedom and intruding on the privacy of citizens to surveil their personal spending habits, which is why Congress must clarify that the Federal Reserve has no authority to implement a CBDC,” Cruz said.

“While Americans across the country are being punished for thinking, speaking, and voting the ‘wrong’ way, the last thing we need is the government surveilling personal finances,” Heritage Action for America explained in a statement concerning the new legislation. “Anti-CBDC legislation is necessary to safeguard Americans’ financial privacy in the face of potential surveillance, control, and political intimidation.”

“CBDCs present major privacy concerns for everyday Americans, including granting the government the ability to collect intimate personal details on U.S. citizens, and potentially track and freeze funds for any reason,” the Blockchain Association noted.

“Big government has no business spying on Americans to control their personal finances and track their transactions,” said Republican U.S. Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, a co-sponsor of the bill.

“It is a massive overreach,” he warned.

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Business

Balanced budget within reach—if Ottawa restrains spending

Published on

From the Fraser Institute

By Jake Fuss and Grady Munro

This level of debt-financed spending has contributed to an estimated $941.9 billion increase in gross federal debt from 2014/15 to 2023/24. In other words, partly due to its spending habits, nearly one in every two dollars of debt currently held by the federal government has been accumulated under Prime Minister Trudeau.

The Trudeau government will table its next budget on April 16. Federal finances have deteriorated in recent years due to the Trudeau government’s string of budget deficits, and high spending has led to a significant amount of debt accumulation, which imposes costs on current and future generations. Yet if the government presents a plan in Budget 2024 to rein in spending growth, it could balance the budget in two years.

Far from its promise to balance the budget by 2019, the Trudeau government has instead run nine consecutive deficits during its time in office. And it doesn’t intend to stop, with annual deficits exceeding $18 billion planned for the next five years.

The root cause of these deficits is the government’s inability to restrain spending. Since 2014/15, annual program spending (total spending minus debt interest) has increased $193.6 billion—or 75.5 per cent. If we control for population growth and inflation, this represents an extra $2,330 per person.

This level of debt-financed spending has contributed to an estimated $941.9 billion increase in gross federal debt from 2014/15 to 2023/24. In other words, partly due to its spending habits, nearly one in every two dollars of debt currently held by the federal government has been accumulated under Prime Minister Trudeau. Debt accumulation will only continue barring a change in course, as the federal government is expected to add another $476.9 billion in gross debt over the next five years.

Simply put, the Trudeau government’s approach towards federal finances has been characterized by high spending, large deficits and significant debt accumulation.

This approach to fiscal policy is concerning. Growing government debt leads to higher debt interest costs, all else equal, which eat up taxpayer dollars that could otherwise have provided services or tax relief for Canadians. And these costs are not trivial. For example, in 2023/24 the federal government is expected to spend more to service its debt ($46.5 billion) than on child-care benefits ($31.2 billion).

Accumulating debt today also increases the tax burden on future generations of Canadians—who are ultimately responsible for paying off this debt. Research suggests this effect could be disproportionate, with future generations needing to pay back a dollar borrowed today with more than one dollar in future taxes.

Although the Trudeau government promises more of the same for the coming years, this need not be the case. Instead, a recent study shows the federal government could balance the budget in two years if it slows spending growth starting in 2024/25. The following figures highlight this approach. The first chart below displays currently planned federal program spending from 2023/24 to 2026/27, compared with the spending path that will balance the budget, while the second chart shows the resulting budgetary balances.

Figure 1

Figure 2

As shown by the first chart, to balance the budget by 2026/27 the federal government must limit annual spending growth to 0.3 per cent for two years. As a result, annual nominal program spending would rise from $469.4 billion in 2024/25 to $472.3 billion in 2026/27. For comparison, the Trudeau government currently plans to increase annual spending up to $499.4 billion during that same period.

Should the government implement this level of spending restraint, the federal deficit would shrink to $21.8 billion in 2025/26 (as opposed to $38.3 billion), and the budget would be balanced by 2026/27 (as opposed to a $27.1 billion deficit). All told, by slowing spending growth to balance the budget, the federal government would avoid accumulating significant debt. Moreover, this also sets the government up to return to budget surpluses in the following years, which could be used to start chipping away at the mountain of federal debt already on the books.

Rather than continue its current approach to fiscal policy, and risk needing to employ more drastic cuts in the future, the Trudeau government should implement modest spending restraint now and balance the budget.

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