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City Hall reopening Monday June 21 – details

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City Hall

City Hall reopening for payments and in-person customer service

Red Deer City Hall will reopen for utility and tax payments on Monday, June 21, and licensing and permit customer service and payments on July 12. The re-introduction of in-person customer service and payments is in alignment with the provincial easing of restrictions that is currently taking place. City Hall will be open Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. until 4:30 p.m. with the exception of holidays.

“We are excited to be reopening City Hall for in-person payments and customer service. This long awaited reopening will enable us to reconnect with our customers in person and still support doing business with us online, where possible,” said Acting City Manager Tara Lodewyk.

Starting Monday, June 21, 2021, key customer service employees will return to City Hall with a phased reopening taking place in the coming weeks and months. With renovations that took place while the building was closed, all customer and public interactions are now provided on the main floor of City Hall.

Some additional changes include new windows and doors, improved customer service kiosks, new security controls and numerous health and safety measures that serve to protect employees and customers accessing City Hall. All renovations were focused on making necessary changes that facilitate improved customer interactions while considering the safety, health and wellness of all employees and citizens.

“As we reopen City Hall for in-person customer service, the health and safety of our citizens and employees is still top of mind. Masks are required inside the building and there will be capacity limits for the number of customers permitted inside at one time,” said Lodewyk. “We kindly ask that anybody coming to City Hall, or accessing any of our recreation or public facilities, uphold all public health restrictions as we work to keep everyone safe throughout the phased reopening.”

A full reopening and return to work for all City employees is expected to take place between June 21 and September 7, 2021. In many cases, City employees have continued to report to their workplace, in-person, based on the requirements of their position; however, with the lifting of the provincial work from home order, The City will welcome its remaining employees back into the workspace with the intention to have everybody back between now and September. This includes City Hall, the Professional Building, Civic Yards and all City owned and operated recreation and culture places and spaces.

“Covid-19 has limited us in many ways. It has taught The City to innovate, work differently and find efficiencies. As we transition back to in-person service, we ask our customers to be patient with us as we navigate the new challenges of our ever changed in-person business offerings. Our business looks different than it did when we closed City Hall more than 15 months ago, and while we are excited to be once again serving you in person, we do expect some bumps along the way,” said Lodewyk.

With changing and modified provincial restrictions continuing to be announced, The City of Red Deer will adapt and update its programs, services and offerings on an ongoing basis. This will include everything from the number of people permitted within a facility at one time, to masking requirements.

“We will continue to take our direction from the provincial government as they ease restrictions and introduce their phased relaunch strategy,” said Lodewyk. “We share the community excitement around the easing of restrictions and continue to work together with our community to uphold public health orders and preventing the spread of Covid-19.”

Starting June 21, the following payments can be made in person at City Hall:

  • Utility bill payment
  • Property tax payment
  • Parking ticket payment
  • Re-loading parking cards
  • Accounts Receivable invoice payment
  • Licence payment
  • Special event permit payment
  • Other miscellaneous fee payments

Starting July 12, the following payments and customer service will be available in-person at City Hall:

  • Parking inquiries
  • Licence and permit applications
  • Inspections

For updates on The City’s municipal response to Covid-19, visit www.reddeer.ca/covid-19.

For more information, please contact:

Corporate Communications
The City of Red Deer

Business

Five key issues—besides Trump’s tariffs—the Carney government should tackle

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From the Fraser Institute

By Jake Fuss and Grady Munro

On Tuesday in Ottawa, Prime Minister Mark Carney unveiled his new cabinet, consisting of 28 ministers and 10 secretaries of state. They have their work cut out for them. In addition to President Trump’s trade war, the Carney government must tackle several other critical issues that have persisted since long before Trump was re-elected.

First and foremost, the Carney government should address stagnant living standards for Canadians. From the beginning of 2016 to the end of 2024, per-person GDP—a broad measure of living standards—grew by only 2.5 per cent in Canada compared to 18.7 per cent in the United States (all figures adjusted for inflation). While U.S. tariffs threaten to further reduce living standards in Canada, the marked decline began almost a decade ago.

There’s a similar gloomy story in worker incomes as Canadians continue to fall further behind their American counterparts. According to the latest data, median employment earnings (in Canadian dollars) in all 10 provinces ranked lower than in every U.S. state in 2022—meaning Americans in low-earning states such as Mississippi ($42,430), Louisiana ($43,318) and Alabama ($43,982) typically earned higher incomes than Canadians in the highest-earning province of Alberta ($38,969).

Why is this happening?

Part of the problem is the state of federal finances. Even Prime Minister Carney has criticized the Trudeau government’s approach to spending increases and debt accumulation, which diverts taxpayer dollars away from programs and towards debt interest payments, and burdens younger generations with higher taxes in the future. But unfortunately, according to Carney’s election platform, his government plans to borrow $93.4 billion more over the next four years compared to the Trudeau government’s last spending plan. The prime minister and his new cabinet should rethink this approach before tabling their first budget.

The Carney government should also cut taxes. Canadians in every province face higher combined (federal and provincial) personal income tax (PIT) rates than Americans in virtually every U.S. state across a variety of income levels. Canada’s PIT rates are similarly uncompetitive compared to other advanced countries. High taxes impose a burden on families, but they also make it harder for Canada to attract and retain high-skilled workers (e.g. doctors, engineers), entrepreneurs and investment, which drives economic growth and prosperity.

Finally, the Carney government should meaningfully address Canada’s housing affordability crisis. Housing costs have risen dramatically due to a significant gap between the demand for houses and the supply of housing units. In 2024, construction began on 245,367 new housing units nationwide while the population grew by 951,717 people due in part to one of the highest levels of immigration in Canadian history. This problem has been growing for decades—housing starts per year have remained stuck at essentially the same level they were in the 1970s while annual population growth has more than tripled. If policymakers want to help lower housing costs, they must reduce the imbalance between population growth and housing starts.

For the federal government, that means aligning immigration targets more closely to housing supply and rethinking policies that increase housing demand such as homebuyer tax credits and First Home Savings Accounts. Meanwhile, provincial and local governments should reduce red tape and construction costs to increase supply.

The Carney government has its work cut out for it. Besides U.S. tariffs, Canadians face several critical issues, which have persisted long before Trump was re-elected, and will continue unless something changes.

Jake Fuss

Director, Fiscal Studies, Fraser Institute

Grady Munro

Policy Analyst, Fraser Institute
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Business

Washington Got the Better of Elon Musk

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The tech tycoon’s Department of Government Efficiency was prevented from achieving its full reform agenda.

It seems that the postmodern world is a conspiracy against great men. Bureaucracy now favors the firm over the founder, and the culture views those who accumulate too much power with suspicion. The twentieth century taught us to fear such men rather than admire them.

Elon Musk—who has revolutionized payments, automobiles, robotics, rockets, communications, and artificial intelligence—may be the closest thing we have to a “great man” today. He is the nearest analogue to the robber barons of the last century or the space barons of science fiction. Yet even our most accomplished entrepreneur appears no match for the managerial bureaucracy of the American state.

Musk will step down from his position leading the Department of Government Efficiency at the end of May. At the outset, the tech tycoon was ebullient, promising that DOGE would reduce the budget deficit by $2 trillion, modernize Washington, and curb waste, fraud, and abuse. His marketing plan consisted of memes and social media posts. Indeed, the DOGE brand itself was an ironic blend of memes, Bitcoin, and Internet humor.

Three months later, however, Musk is chastened. Though DOGE succeeded in dismantling USAID, modernizing the federal retirement system, and improving the Treasury Department’s payment security, the initiative as a whole has fallen short. Savings, even by DOGE’s fallible math, will be closer to $100 billion than $2 trillion. Washington is marginally more efficient today than it was before DOGE began, but the department failed to overcome the general tendency of governmental inertia.

Musk’s marketing strategy ran into difficulties, too. His Internet-inflected language was too strange for the average citizen. And the Left, as it always does, countered proposed cuts with sob stories and personal narratives, paired with a coordinated character-assassination attempt portraying Musk as a greedy billionaire eager to eliminate essential services and children’s cancer research.

However meretricious these attacks were, they worked. Musk’s popularity has declined rapidly, and the terror campaign against Tesla drew blood: the company’s stock has slumped in 2025—down around 20 percent—and the board has demanded that Musk return to the helm.

But the deeper problem is that DOGE has always been a confused effort. It promised to cut the federal budget by roughly a third; deliver technocratic improvements to make government efficient; and eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse. As I warned last year, no viable path existed for DOGE to implement these reforms. Further, these promises distracted from what should have been the department’s primary purpose: an ideological purge.

Ironically, this was the one area where DOGE made major progress. In just a few months, the department managed to dismantle one of the most progressive federal agencies, USAID; defund left-wing NGOs, including cutting over $1 billion in grants from the Department of Education; and advance a theory of executive power that enabled the president to slash Washington’s DEI bureaucracy.

Musk also correctly identified the two keys to the kingdom: human resources and payments. DOGE terminated the employment of President Trump’s ideological opponents within the federal workforce and halted payments to the most corrupted institutions, setting the precedent for Trump to withhold funds from the Ivy League universities. At its best, DOGE functioned as a method of targeted de-wokification that forced some activist elements of the Left into recession—a much-needed program, though not exactly what was originally promised.

Ultimately, DOGE succeeded where it could and failed where it could not. Musk’s project expanded presidential power but did not fundamentally change the budget, which still requires congressional approval. Washington’s fiscal crisis is not, at its core, an efficiency problem; it’s a political one. When DOGE was first announced, many Republican congressmen cheered Musk on, declaring, “It’s time for DOGE!” But this was little more than an abdication of responsibility, shifting the burden—and ultimately the blame—onto Musk for Congress’s ongoing failure to take on the politically unpopular task of controlling spending.

With Musk heading back to his companies, it remains to be seen who, if anyone, will take up the mantle of budget reform in Congress. Unfortunately, the most likely outcome is that Republicans will revert to old habits: promising to balance the budget during campaign season and blowing it up as soon as the legislature convenes.

The end of Musk’s tenure at DOGE reminds us that Washington can get the best even of great men. The fight for fiscal restraint is not over, but the illusion that it can be won through efficiency and memes has been dispelled. Our fate lies in the hands of Congress—and that should make Americans pessimistic.

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