Opinion

The City wants to discredit the province’s environment study, during an election year.

Published

7 years ago

5 minute read

I was on the city’s Environment Committee when the province made it’s report. Questions were raised, the panel answered, the report was accepted and the panel was praised. Concerned as I was I started asking questions and raising issues. Riverside Park monitoring showed the worst results for the city and for the region. The region as a whole has shown the worst results in the province. The province was on track to be the worst nationwide.
Riverside Park is located on the north side of the river near the 67th Street bridge. Whether this an issue or not, but one has to consider there is about 12,000 families living north of the river. There is no high school north of the river so all the high school students have to cross the river to get to high school. Blackfalds also does not have a high school so those students would have to cross the river to attend a Red Deer high school.
There is only one 40 year old recreational complex north of the river, but the most popular complex is the Collicutt Centre on 30th Ave hooking up to the 67th Street Bridge. 12,000 families have to cross the bridge for education, recreation, hospitalization and cultural activities. On the flip side, all the industrial parks are on the north side, and a large number of the 28,000 families on the south side rely on employment in the north side industrial park. They may not live on the north side because they want to live near their children’s schools, ice rinks and swimming pools on the south side.
You can imagine there would be a lot of commuting across the 67th Street bridge, not all but a lot. So what does the city do, when confronted with this information. They are building or planning 3 more high schools near 30th Ave and 67th Street bridge on the south side of town. They are rebuilding and expanding facilities on the south side. They are planning on tearing down the south side downtown Recreational Centre and rebuilding.
All the while they are planning on another 10,000 plus families north of Hwy 11A. They will commute on the 67th Street bridge until they can build another bridge on the other side of the Riverside Park monitoring station.

The city has shrunk in population by almost 1,000 residents and 777 of those residents who moved away lived on the north side of the river. That should ease the commuting portion of the pollution, but 700 new residents moved into Blackfalds adding to the commuting portion, since many will work in Red Deer or go to the south side high schools.

The city accepted the 2015 report, ignored the concerns as did the school boards, so why all of a sudden is the city acting like a tobacco company looking to discredit a report they have known, accepted and studied for over a year? Perhaps it is because there are so many bad reports out there showing Red Deer in a negative light? Highest pollution, high crime, second most dangerous city, high unemployment, decrease in population, businesses leaving, increasing tax rates, and high vacancies could be cause for concern.

Why now would we suddenly extol the possibility that our Riverside Park with all it’s green space, river and parks and industry is slightly better than the air in downtown Calgary and Edmonton. High density, high traffic parts of cities with 800,000 to 1,000,000 residents, why? To attract business, but they were doing that last year, so why now? Could it be because this is an election year? That would be some achievements, high crime, highly dangerous, most polluted region in the country. I imagine that may be why our city is starting to look like a tobacco company trying to discredit a government report on cigarette smoke.

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International / 48 mins ago

Why Biden’s Gaza refugee plan is a hard hell no

Education / 3 hours ago

Schools shouldn’t sacrifice student performance to vague notions of ‘equity’

International

Why Biden’s Gaza refugee plan is a hard hell no

Published on May 8, 2024

Todayville

From Todd Bensman

As published May 7, 2024 by The New York Daily News

Just about all of the Gaza Strip’s two million inhabitants have gone through decades of institutionalized cradle-to-grave indoctrination into the ruling Hamas’ upside down 7th century Islamist value system, which features at its core and extremely violent religious ideology.

As President Biden considers bringing Gaza war refugees into the United States, he would do well to recall what happened when other good-hearted people took a similar chance – and paid with their blood.

Before the October 7 Hamas attack, Israeli citizens sponsored work permits for thousands of security-vetted Palestinians to earn money working on some of their farms in towns not far from the Gaza Strip.

Some of those Gazan day laborers are believed to have used their access to provide tactical information that helped Hamas terrorists kill hundreds of Israelis on October 7.

The bad apples lesson of that still developing story – and another where security-vetted Palestinian UN workers directly assisted the October 7 attackers – is central to the problem with an American plan to import Gazan war refugees. It’s an unacceptable national security risk.

That’s because just about all of the Gaza Strip’s two million inhabitants have gone through decades of institutionalized cradle-to-grave indoctrination into the ruling Hamas’ upside down 7th century Islamist value system, which features at its core and extremely violent religious ideology.

Hamas relentlessly preaches that humanity’s highest virtues are suicide bombing, armed combat, genocide, intolerance of difference, and a dehumanizing hatred of Jews and Americans.

Yes, there will be exceptions among Gazans who are independent-minded enough to rebel. But if Israel can’t readily suss out the tolerant, then certainly America’s refugee bureaucrats will have far less luck.

A large number of respectable academic and think tank studies have shown how Hamas indoctrinates the people of the Gaza Strip.

Recall the recent reports of jubilant children, women and men cheering, spitting at, and even beating both alive and dead Israeli hostages paraded through Gaza after the October 7 attack.

“These are the people you might be bringing here,” said Nayla Rush, a refugee policy expert for the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Immigration Studies, who recently penned a column titled “Resettled Refugees Do Not Necessarily Leave Their Beliefs and Biases Behind.” “How are you going to vet them? What do you do, go to the Hamas authorities and ask? That’s a huge breach of any vetting. It’s impossible.”

Hamas starts things up in kindergarten and ramps up the ideological training all the way through the Islamic University of Gaza, a redoubt of hatred established by Hamas’ founding father in 1978 and which offers law degrees from a “Sharia Law Department” and whose engineering department is there to churn out combat engineers for Hamas tunnels.

As a 2013 New York Times report put it, the required school textbooks and curriculum “infuse the next generation with its militant ideology” as part of a required national education course of study in government schools.

The children are taught never to recognize modern Israel as anything more than a target of genocidal violence, Gaza school curricula is replete with thousands of examples of violent incitement against the Jewish state and Jewish people.

Tens of thousands have attended Hamas summer camps, where its armed terrorist operatives serve as camp counselors dishing out violent Islamist ideology and military training to prep them for conscription into Hamas’ armed forces.

Teachers and authority figures of every stripe teach the children that waging jihad that kills Jews is a solemn religious duty where martyrdom earns the believer paradise in heaven, a November 2023 analysis of collected Arabic television news segments shows.

“The next generation of Palestinians is being relentlessly fed a rhetorical diet that includes the idolization of terrorists, the demonization of Jews and the conviction that sooner or later Israel should cease to exist,” Yuval Steinitz, Israel’s minister of intelligence and international affairs, wrote in a 2013 New York Times opinion column.

He noted that, for instance, some Facebook pages of government-supported Palestinian schools glorified Adolph Hitler’s genocide against European Jewry and that “Jews and Zionists are horrible creatures that corrupt those in their vicinity.”

A 2021 European Union analysis of 156 Palestinian school textbooks found that many glorified suicide terrorists as role models and demonize Jews as dangerous and deceptive so as to generate feelings of hatred.

Hamas’ popular Al Aqsa TV gained international notoriety when its children’s show star, the Mickey Mouse-like character, Farfour, was outed for promoting radical Islam, hatred of Jews, and for urging children to take up AK-47 assault rifles.

The station’s response to international outrage was to depict an “Israeli” bureaucrat unjustly beating Farfour to death, then replaced the character with a bee named Nahool who continued to preach violence.

And so much for tolerance. Any Gazan at any age who might be brought to the United States can be expected to regard non-Muslims as sub-human after years of indoctrination backed by extreme violence against Christians in Gaza.

Islamist proselytizers have kidnapped thousands of Christians and forced them to convert to Islam and burned churches to the ground.

The tiny population of Christians that have not fled Hamas persecution remain subject to targeting “in ways even more acute and systemic than Christians in the West Bank and Israel,” a 2022 University of Notre Dame analysis concluded.

Christians feel coercion to covert to Islam, while Christian women are harassed and pressured to cover their hair and adopt Islamic forms of clothing.

Polling of Gazans consistently show majority support for the October 7 attack and for Hamas, whose backing has risen since the attack.

And large majorities have long viewed the United States as an enemy of Palestinian Arabs, one Pew poll showing that number at 76% a decade ago and soaring, if that is even possible, since the new war began

“The level of anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism is huge among Palestinians because of the positions they have taken regarding international humanitarian law and what is happening in Gaza,” pollster Khalil Shikaki told the Associated Press in December.

Absent even a national security risk in importing men, women and children deeply schooled in blood lust, why would the Biden administration think it wise to import such America-haters into the country?

But in the end, Gazans must be regarded as too great a national security threat for a US humanitarian gambit.

By all means, do facilitate their exits to friendlier and safer neighborhoods in the region. Provide humanitarian aid. Arrange for medical treatment elsewhere. Send doctors on the UN Navy’s Mercy hospital ship.

But importing them into the United States as refugees? These are not the people, and this is definitely not the time.

Todd Bensman is a senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies.

Education

Schools shouldn’t sacrifice student performance to vague notions of ‘equity’

Published on May 8, 2024

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Derek J. Allison

According to a new study published by the Fraser Institute, if Canada wants to remain competitive with emerging economies around the world, we must increase our math, science and reading scores—and not simply pursue high levels of “equity and inclusion” as the primary goal for our schools.

Indeed, highly equitable and inclusive schools—with declining PISA scores, as is currently the case in Canada—do a disservice to students and society at large.

Why? Because higher test scores translate into greater “knowledge capital”—that is, the full body of knowledge available to an economy—and boost economic growth (and, incidentally, the tax revenues that fund our schools).

Indeed, the goal should be equitable access to a quality education. And the most realistic and meaningful way to measure student progress is through PISA tests, which every three years assess the performance of 15-year-olds worldwide in core subjects of math, science and reading rather than the limited curriculum objectives used in provincial testing, which can only show progress or decline within individual school systems. In today’s world, where competition is truly global, we must know how our students and schools perform compared to their peers in other countries, especially the “Asian Tigers” of Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore and Tiawan whose rapidly growing economies have been driven by rising PISA scores.

Obviously, countries with higher test scores can teach other countries how to improve—although there are limits and some traps here. Attempting to cut and paste Singapore’s or Korea’s much more meritocratic systems of highly competitive student assessment and selection would be impractical and impolitic in Canada. Even so, policymakers should consider reinstating more meaningful meritocratic norms in Canadian schools to encourage and recognize academic achievement. Nothing succeeds like success, except recognized and rewarded success.

Closer to home, other provinces could benefit from considering why Quebec is such a stellar performer in math and why Alberta has the highest overall PISA test score average of all provinces.

But fair warning, recent attempts at school improvement in Canada show that top-down one-size-fits-all changes—including extending compulsory attendance, reducing average class size and tinkering with course content—have had little positive effect on student performance, although they may please teacher unions. If policymakers want to achieve more equitable success for more students, they should introduce more flexibility, school autonomy and choice into our top-heavy centrally regulated school systems. In this respect it may be no accident that the three highest performing, mid-spending provincial K-12 education systems (Alberta, Quebec and Ontario) offer relatively high levels of school choice, although of quite different kinds.

Equity and inclusion are noble goals, but they shouldn’t interfere with student progress. There’s too much at stake, for students and the country.