Opinion

Red Deer, for many is “A nice place to work but they don’t want to live here”

Published

9 years ago

8 minute read

October 16 2017 is the final exam for the current city council, mayor and the school boards. That is the day the citizens of Red Deer will elect a mayor, a city council and 2 school boards.
Some incumbents, will retire and not put their name forward, others may fail. Some will pass the exam solely on their personalities, good looks or connections, while others will work hard to pass and continue on for 4 more years.
What will they have on their resume?
The city has declined, dramatically while others have grown and prospered. The city shrank by 1%, (Blackfalds grew by 8%), unemployment is increasing, crime is increasing, vacancies are increasing, new home builds are down, businesses are leaving, and taxes are increasing. The north side of the river population 30,000, is still being discriminated against. No new schools in 30 years, still no high school, no new swimming pool in 30 years, no new indoor ice rink in 30 years. Blackfalds is fundraising for a second indoor ice rink, now with a population of only 9510.
I like to ask myself, why do these intelligent members of councils, school boards and mayors discriminate against sectors of Red Deer? I know that the north side of the river has been discriminated against both in operations and in planning, so when will my area be discriminated against, next year, next decade, or next election?
What will happen in the next nine months?
First of all this will be their final budget. The fiscal hawks, will have to show that they had what it took, to be fiscally responsible, these past 4 years. Can they square the circle of continuing tax increases, continued growth at city hall, continued increased spending, while the citizens are earning less, losing jobs, and ultimately leaving, with almost a 1,000 people moving out of Red Deer last year, 777 from north of the river.
Some will say that any decisions they make, you will not see any effect for 2 years. Fine, so what decisions did you make 3 years ago, that saw almost a thousand people leave the city last year, that saw our city become the second highest in crime rate across Canada. What decisions did you make 2 years ago that saw our unemployment rate increase last month, and businesses move from downtown to gasoline alley? What decisions did you make last year that would make you think that the city will not grow next year, negating the need for the annual census? Do not make those same decisions.
Apparently, for 700 former residents, it is better to fight rush hour traffic and drive back and forth to Blackfalds, than to live in Red Deer. What happened to make Red Deer; “A nice place to work, but I wouldn’t want to live there.”
Will the city increase taxes? Will they continue putting 1% in savings and blame that for increases? It shouldn’t because if they stayed with last year’s budget it would still be there. Will they expand staff levels, increase personnel, security, operations without reducing and redundancies? The city shrank by 1% and cost of living barely rose over 1%, 100 x 99% x101%= 99.99%. The fiscal hawks better have a good explanation for any tax increases.
The downtown protectionists, will have to explain why downtown businesses are leaving for areas like gasoline alley, after we spent so much, time, money and energy downtown. Roads, services, patios, entertainment, advertising, and businesses are leaving. What was our return on investment? Will we continue to pour millions into downtown projects at the expense of other areas and taxpayers?
Why is there no plans for a high school, north of the river? The area north of 11a will provide homes for 20,000+ more residents, meaning there will be 50,000+ residents north of the river, yet there is no plan for a high school. The incumbents will blame others, the city, the province, past-members, but they had 4 years to implement a plan. Why has fund raising become so necessary?
Nine months will see new initiatives brought forward, only to be forgotten on October 17. Incumbents will finally have an opinion, find a voice, and express their beliefs, before becoming mute again on October 17. New medias will offer more insight into the incumbents. The election of Notley in Alberta, Trudeau in Ottawa, and Trump in the USA will give a voice and optimism to the need for change, and give some awareness to re-election campaigns.
Perhaps in the next nine months leading up to the election on October 16, 2017, someone might say it is time. Instead of building the 7th or 8th indoor ice rink south of the river we could build a 2nd one north of the river. Instead of building the 5th and 6th high school south of the river we could build a 1st one north of the river. Instead of tearing down the recreation centre downtown so we can make the indoor pool bigger and the outdoor pool smaller we could build a 2nd pool north of the river.
Perhaps in the next nine months, an incumbent will say, the Collicutt Centre was a huge success, and kick started development in the south-east we should replicate that success in the north-west. We could build it by Hazlett Lake, fulfilling some of the needs of the residents, kick start development and give boost to our tourism and diversification desires.
The incumbents cannot say yes to every demand, and we do not expect them too. We would be outraged if for example, they only said yes to men and only said no to women. Would we be equally outraged if they only said yes to the south and only no to the north? Apparently not given the evidence of no high school ever, no new schools, indoor pools and indoor ice rinks in 30 plus years, north of the river.
The next nine months leading up to the municipal election on Monday October 16, 2017 will see some changes, will see stands taken, ideas proposed and many explanations. Will it be enough or is there enough impetus for change? We will have to see.
Thank you.

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Energy

Minus Forty and the Myth of Easy Energy

Published on October 20, 2025

Todayville

By Stewart Muir

It’s not about ideology at forty degrees below zero. It’s about survival

When the thermometer plunges to forty below, ideology no longer matters. Survival does.

That lesson was driven home in January 2024, when a brutal cold snap swept across America’s Pacific Northwest and western Canada. For four days, the region’s interconnected energy system teetered on the brink of collapse. Power lines snapped, gas pipelines strained, and four states of emergency were declared. In Portland, a falling power line killed three people and injured a baby.

This was no ordinary winter storm. It quickly became known as the January 2024 Event – a capital-letter crisis that planners are still analyzing nearly two years later. As recently as August 2025, experts continued to hold panels to ask the same question: how did the grid survive? Their verdict is grim.

Hydropower, long the Northwest’s reliable backup, faltered. Wind turbines stood still as the winds died at exactly the wrong time. Solar panels offered little under heavy gray skies. Natural gas supplied about two-thirds of the energy as furnaces worked around the clock – but even gas has limits.

The Real Problem: Capacity, Not Cold

Here’s the twist: post-event analysis shows the real problem wasn’t the cold. It was demand growth colliding with a system stripped of firm capacity. The cold snap may not have been unprecedented, but the risks were, BC Hydro’s Powerex reported.

They also warned that fashionable fixes like batteries and pumped hydro aren’t the cavalry many hope for. These technologies can even worsen shortages by competing for scarce electricity when it’s needed most. One Alberta utility estimated it would take a battery bigger than 13 years of the world’s entire EV battery output to cover its customers’ electricity needs for those few days.

Meanwhile, the renewables lobby was left scrambling for answers. Investigations by ProPublica and Oregon Public Broadcasting highlighted the obvious: Oregon and Washington had set “100% green” targets without solving the transmission bottlenecks needed to deliver that power. Instead of addressing the flaw, advocates doubled down, calling for more wind, more solar, more batteries without any credible plan for the impossibly large quantities required.

And so, in the depths of that frigid January, reality intruded. Gas-fired generation carried the essential load. Imports were pulled in. Utilities called for conservation, and households responded. System operators dug deep, showing remarkable resilience under pressure. Heroic efforts kept the lights on. But it should never have come to that.

The lesson is not that renewables are bad or that we should cling to the past. It is that energy policy must begin with humility. Weather is unpredictable. In a cross-border region of 26 million people, demand is also growing much faster than once forecast.

A Wake-Up Call Ignored

When lives are on the line, nothing replaces firm, dispatchable power. A balanced system – yes, with more renewables, but anchored by natural gas and supported by robust transmission – is essential. Pretending we can run an advanced economy on press releases and hope is how ideology masquerades as policy, and how families end up shivering in the dark.

The January 2024 event should have been a wake-up call. Yet too many leaders remain captivated by slogans and blind to physics. The grid doesn’t read legislation. It doesn’t listen to speeches. It responds only to supply, demand, and the weather. And when the weather turns deadly, the reckoning is swift.

Dreamers will keep promising a painless transition. British Columbia, for example, is shutting down domestic gas generation in what’s branded a “pivot” to renewables – even as the province ships its first LNG cargoes to a world hungry for reliable gas. At the same time, the explosive growth of data centres driven by artificial intelligence has experts agog at what this means for an already strained system.

Eighteen months after the event, the people we expect to have answers are still asking questions.

Questions Still Unanswered

Here’s one more: is our energy system’s fragility the result of wishful thinking colliding with reality? To many experts, the answer seems obvious.

At minus forty, there is no spin, no ideology—only survival.

If Canada and the Northwest want to avoid a repeat of January 2024, the path is clear: double down on reliability, build the neglected transmission, and keep firm power in the system. Because the next deep freeze—or heat wave—will not wait for us to get our politics straight.

References

LA Times (Jan 17, 2024). Pacific Northwest ice storm kills three.

NewsData (Aug 2025). Panelists: January 2024 gas shortage sparked conversations on coordination.

USACE (2024). Don’t bet on the weather: the role hydropower plays in balancing the grid.

Western Power Pool (2024). Assessment of January 2024 Cold Weather Event.

Powerex (Mar 2024). Analysis of the January 2024 Winter Weather Event.

ProPublica/OPB (May 2025). How the Pacific Northwest’s dream of green energy fell apart.

NW Energy Coalition (2024). Customer-side resources critical to reliability.

Fraser Institute

Métis will now get piece of ever-expanding payout pie

Published on October 20, 2025

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Tom Flanagan

The history of Ile-à-la-Crosse (IALC) in northern Saskatchewan goes back to 1776, when Thomas Frobisher established a fur trading post. Catholic Oblate missionaries arrived in 1846 and founded a small day school the next year, which was turned into a boarding school in 1860. Louis Riel’s sister Sara taught there until she died of TB in 1883. Under various names and at various locations, the school survived until the early 1970s.

The students were mainly Métis from northern Saskatchewan, with a sprinkling of Indian and white children. It was never an Indian Residential School (IRS) in the legal sense, though the federal government did at times make financial contributions proportional to the small number of status Indian children who attended. The school was mainly supported by the Oblate order and the Grey Nuns, with contributions from the province of Saskatchewan in later years.

Because the school was not an IRS, those who had attended were excluded from the IRS Settlement Agreement negotiated by Paul Martin’s government in 2005 and implemented by Stephen Harper’s government afterwards. Most students had been Métis, and the Settlement Agreement generally excluded Métis who had attended mission boarding schools that were not IRS. Wanting to share in the $5 billion financial compensation provided by the Agreement, the IALC students started legal action, using Tony Merchant’s law firm. Merchant, however, moved too slowly for the complainants, so the Sotos firm started another class action in 2022.

Following the “resistance is futile” policy enunciated by Jodi Wilson-Raybould when she was minister of justice, the federal government had already decided not to litigate, having signed in 2019 a memorandum of understanding to negotiate the claims. In March 2025, the federal government reached an agreement-in-principle with IALC students, which will go before a federal court judge for approval in January 2026. Saskatchewan announced its own agreement-in-principle in September, which will also go before the federal court.

Canada is putting up $27 million and Saskatchewan $40 million for individual compensation. With an estimated 600-700 “survivors,” this equates to individual payouts of about $100,000 apiece. This is admittedly guesswork, because neither agreement-in-principle has been published. News reports indicate that “families” will be involved in the compensation, so a larger number of claimants may materialize.

The federal news release says that compensation is being paid for “cultural loss abuse,” which includes loss of proficiency in the Cree and Michif languages spoken by the Métis in that area. Sexual and physical abuse are not mentioned, even though “survivors” claim to have been abused. Payments will be made to all who attended, as with the federal day school settlement and the “common experience” payment in the IRS settlement.

In the world of government, the joint payout of $67 million is a penny-ante affair, but the long-term implications are much greater. There are tens of thousands of Métis adults who attended mission boarding schools, both Protestant and Catholic, that were not considered IRS and were not admitted to the IRS Settlement Agreement. For them, the IALC settlement is like a dam breaking, setting a precedent for compensation. Class action law firms will commence new actions. Individual cases will be small, but there will be so many of them that the federal government will probably consolidate them into one multi-billion-dollar settlement, and the provinces will fall into line.

When Prime Minister Harper decided to implement the IRS settlement Agreement, he thought it would bring peace on the Indigenous front, allowing the government to move forward. It was an understandable hope, but in fact that decision unleashed a series of class actions that have cost taxpayers more than $50 billion and rising. When Harper was in power, he kept the lid on; but payments exploded after Justin Trudeau became prime minister in 2015 and made Wilson-Raybould minister of justice. Her instruction to Department of Justice lawyers to negotiate rather than litigate, which is still in force, caused resistance to Indigenous class actions to collapse and facilitated enormous payouts culminating in the $40 billion-plus child-care settlement. Now the Métis will get their piece of this ever-expanding payout pie.