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Safey City Wheels in Some Great Summer Programs

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Looking for some fun activities to put into your summer calendar?  Have you considered Safety City?  It’s a fantastic facility that offers a multitude of programs to entertain and educate your children.

Red Deer Safety City opened its doors to classes on April 24, 2001. The main focus is to teach children and their families how to be safe in varying situations.

At Safety City, they what to do when faced with a tough decision or emergency. Knowledge is power and can save a child’s life. Feed them the power to know how to be safe in numerous situations.

Safety City is an organization dedicated to ensuring safety for everyone in and around our community. We have programs that we deliver both to the schools and for the public. Safety is the key message in all of our programs. What would your children do in a fire? How would they behave if they came face to face with a momma cow? Do they know the proper steps for crossing the street safely? Do you? Come see us at Red Deer Safety City to help keep you and your children safe.

Field Trips

Safety City offers fun, interactive field trips available to schools in Red Deer and Central Alberta. Children learn in a classroom setting and then get to apply their knowledge in a hands-on setting.

  • Pedestrian Traffic Safety, offered in May and June
  • Fire and Home Safety, offered in September, October, and April
  • Acreage and Farm Safety, offered in September, October, and April

Programs:

Safety City is open to the public for a variety of safety-oriented programs. Children learn in a classroom and apply what they have learned to real-life settings. Join us in escaping a fire (simulated), riding on quads as the driver’s on the road, trying to climb out of a dug out, and using your bikes properly. Or do it all and some, with our exciting week-long summer camps.

  • Pedestrian Traffic Safety
  • Bicycle Safety
  • Fire and Home Safety
  • Acreage and Farm Safety
  • Summer Camps
  • Birthday Parties

Acreage and Farm

  • This interactive 2 hour program teaches children to recognize potential dangers and avoid injury on the acreage or farm. During a classroom story lesson, children learn to safely navigate a number of realistic, potentially hazardous situations. In the Safety Centre for the final 90 minutes of activity, children practice new safety skills at displays including animal, ATV, grain handling, dugout and chemical safety.
  • Cost: $15/child. Parent attends with child – Dates available: July and August

Pedestrian Safety:

During this 90 minute program, street safety lessons are presented in the classroom using an interactive story board depicting a neighbourhood. Children learn to safely cross the street, the meaning of various road signs, and how to read a set of traffic lights. Outdoors on the streetscape for the final hour, children practice their new skills as drivers and pedestrians. Bicycle helmet required – Cost: $15/per child. Parent attends with child – Dates available: July and August

Fire and Home:

Do you have a home escape plan? Do your children know how to call 911? This 2 hour program combines a safety lesson with hands-on-activities, to teach about how fires start, ways to eliminate fire hazards from the home, and how to create a home escape plan. Children also practice calling 911. In the Fire Safe House, children conduct a kitchen inspection and put their home escape plan into action.

Cost: $15/per child. Parent attends with child – Dates available: July and August

Bicycle Safety:

With a focus on proper road safety procedures, this 5 hour program combines classroom instruction with on-site training to build on existing skills of the young cyclist. Participants must be able to ride without training wheels, and are required to bring their own bicycles and bicycle helmets.

Cost: $40/per child – Supervised program – Parent not required  to attend – Dates available: May, June, July and August

Summer Camps:

A week of fun, unique experiences and activity! Children explore a new safety topic each day and learn how to avoid injury. Through stories, games, and crafts children learn about pedestrian traffic safety, animal bite prevention, acreage and farm safety, fire and home safety and bicycle safety (training wheels permitted).

Morning Camp: 9am – 12noon, $100/per child – Full Day Camp: 8am-5pm, $180/per child.

Supervised program. Parent not required to attend – Dates available: July and August

Birthday Parties:

Celebrate your child’s special day in a fun and unique way! At this 2 hour party, children learn about road safety, ride battery-powered quads, and enjoy family time in the party room.

Maximum of 15 children (including birthday child) – Ages 4-12 – Cost: $150 per party. Includes safety lesson, quad riding + indoor classroom. Parents provide rest of party items – Dates available: May, June, July and August

Facility rentals:

We have space available for your next corporate party, board meeting, family reunion or birthday party. We can accommodate smaller and larger groups for various purposes. Contact our office for more information or check our event calendar for availability.

There is a wonderful outdoor space, which can accommodate very large groups during the beautiful weather of spring, summer and fall. We also have a smaller, indoor room better suited for meetings and more formal group gatherings. Separate from those, we also have a party room that is perfect for birthday parties, family reunions or the special gathering of your choice.

For more information on Safety City, CLICK HERE.

Make sure you support these terrific local companies and organizations that through their sponsorship make Safety City possible.

Bruin’s Plumbing and Heating

Southside Dodge

Kiwanis Club

Dairy Queen

Fas Gas

Pro Form

Big 105

Ing and McKee

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Community

SPARC Red Deer – Caring Adult Nominations open now!

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Red Deer community let’s give a round of applause to the incredible adults shaping the future of our kids. Whether they’re a coach, neighbour, teacher, mentor, instructor, or someone special, we want to know about them!

Tell us the inspiring story of how your nominee is helping kids grow up great. We will honour the first 100 local nominees for their outstanding contributions to youth development. It’s time to highlight those who consistently go above and beyond!

To nominate, visit Events (sparcreddeer.ca)

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Addictions

‘Harm Reduction’ is killing B.C.’s addicts. There’s got to be a better way

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From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Susan Martinuk 

B.C. recently decriminalized the possession of small amounts of illicit drugs. The resulting explosion of addicts using drugs in public spaces, including parks and playgrounds, recently led the province’s NDP government to attempt to backtrack on this policy

Since 2016, more than 40,000 Canadians have died from opioid drug overdoses — almost as many as died during the Second World War.
Governments, health care professionals and addiction experts all acknowledge that widespread use of opioids has created a public health crisis in Canada. Yet they agree on virtually nothing else about this crisis, including its causes, possible remedies and whether addicts should be regarded as passive victims or accountable moral agents.

Fuelled by the deadly manufactured opioid fentanyl, Canada’s national drug overdose rate stood at 19.3 people per 100,000 in 2022, a shockingly high number when compared to the European Union’s rate of just 1.8. But national statistics hide considerable geographic variation. British Columbia and Alberta together account for only a quarter of Canada’s population yet nearly half of all opioid deaths. B.C.’s 2022 death rate of 45.2/100,000 is more than double the national average, with Alberta close behind at 33.3/100,00.

In response to the drug crisis, Canada’s two western-most provinces have taken markedly divergent approaches, and in doing so have created a natural experiment with national implications.

B.C. has emphasized harm reduction, which seeks to eliminate the damaging effects of illicit drugs without actually removing them from the equation. The strategy focuses on creating access to clean drugs and includes such measures as “safe” injection sites, needle exchange programs, crack-pipe giveaways and even drug-dispensing vending machines. The approach goes so far as to distribute drugs like heroin and cocaine free of charge in the hope addicts will no longer be tempted by potentially tainted street drugs and may eventually seek help.

But safe-supply policies create many unexpected consequences. A National Post investigation found, for example, that government-supplied hydromorphone pills handed out to addicts in Vancouver are often re-sold on the street to other addicts. The sellers then use the money to purchase a street drug that provides a better high — namely, fentanyl.

Doubling down on safe supply, B.C. recently decriminalized the possession of small amounts of illicit drugs. The resulting explosion of addicts using drugs in public spaces, including parks and playgrounds, recently led the province’s NDP government to attempt to backtrack on this policy — though for now that effort has been stymied by the courts.

According to Vancouver city councillor Brian Montague, “The stats tell us that harm reduction isn’t working.” In an interview, he calls decriminalization “a disaster” and proposes a policy shift that recognizes the connection between mental illness and addiction. The province, he says, needs “massive numbers of beds in treatment facilities that deal with both addictions and long-term mental health problems (plus) access to free counselling and housing.”

In fact, Montague’s wish is coming true — one province east, in Alberta. Since the United Conservative Party was elected in 2019, Alberta has been transforming its drug addiction policy away from harm reduction and towards publicly-funded treatment and recovery efforts.

Instead of offering safe-injection sites and free drugs, Alberta is building a network of 10 therapeutic communities across the province where patients can stay for up to a year, receiving therapy and medical treatment and developing skills that will enable them to build a life outside the drug culture. All for free. The province’s first two new recovery centres opened last year in Lethbridge and Red Deer. There are currently over 29,000 addiction treatment spaces in the province.

This treatment-based strategy is in large part the work of Marshall Smith, current chief of staff to Alberta’s premier and a former addict himself, whose life story is a testament to the importance of treatment and recovery.

The sharply contrasting policies of B.C. and Alberta allow a comparison of what works and what doesn’t. A first, tentative report card on this natural experiment was produced last year in a study from Stanford University’s network on addiction policy (SNAP). Noting “a lack of policy innovation in B.C.,” where harm reduction has become the dominant policy approach, the report argues that in fact “Alberta is currently experiencing a reduction in key addiction-related harms.” But it concludes that “Canada overall, and B.C. in particular, is not yet showing the progress that the public and those impacted by drug addiction deserve.”

The report is admittedly an early analysis of these two contrasting approaches. Most of Alberta’s recovery homes are still under construction, and B.C.’s decriminalization policy is only a year old. And since the report was published, opioid death rates have inched higher in both provinces.

Still, the early returns do seem to favour Alberta’s approach. That should be regarded as good news. Society certainly has an obligation to try to help drug users. But that duty must involve more than offering addicts free drugs. Addicted people need treatment so they can kick their potentially deadly habit and go on to live healthy, meaningful lives. Dignity comes from a life of purpose and self-control, not a government-funded fix.

Susan Martinuk is a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and author of the 2021 book Patients at Risk: Exposing Canada’s Health Care Crisis. A longer version of this article recently appeared at C2CJournal.ca.

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