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

Published

8 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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‘We’re Going To Lose’: Steve Bannon Warns Withholding Epstein Files Would Doom GOP

Published on July 12, 2025

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Jason Cohen

Former White House adviser Steve Bannon warned on Friday that Republicans would suffer major losses if President Donald Trump’s administration does not move to release documents related to deceased pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes and associations.

Axios reported on Sunday that a two-page memo showed the Department Of Justice (DOJ) and FBI found no evidence Epstein kept a “client list” or was murdered, but public doubts have continued. Bannon said on “Bannon’s War Room” that failure to release information would lead to the dissipation of one-tenth of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement and significant losses for the Republican Party in the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election.

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“It’s not about just a pedophile ring and all that, it’s about who governs us, right? And that’s why it’s not going to go away … For this to go away, you’re going to lose 10% of the MAGA movement,” Bannon said. “If we lose 10% of the MAGA movement right now, we’re going to lose 40 seats in ’26, we’re going to lose the [presidency]. They don’t even have to steal it, which they’re going to try to do in ’28, because they’re going to sit there and they go, ‘They’ve disheartened the hardest-core populist nationalists’ — that’s always been who governs us.”

Bannon also demanded the publication of all the Epstein documents on “Bannon’s War Room” Thursday. He called on the DOJ to go to court and push for the release of the documents or for Trump to appoint a special counsel to manage the publication.

Epstein was arrested in 2019 and charged with sex trafficking. Shortly after, he was found dead in his New York Metropolitan Correctional Center cell shortly after. Officials asserted that he hanged himself in his cell.

However, Epstein’s death has sparked years of theories because of the malfunctioning of prison cameras, along with guards admitting to falsifying documents about checking on the then-inmate. The DOJ inspector general later confirmed that multiple surveillance cameras outside of his cell were inoperable, while others captured the common area outside his door.

Both Bannon and Daily Caller News Foundation co-founder Tucker Carlson have speculated that Epstein had connections to intelligence agencies.

Former Labor Secretary Alex Acosta allegedly indicated that Epstein was tied to intelligence, according to Vicky Ward in The Daily Beast.

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FBI’s Dan Bongino may resign after dispute about Epstein files with Pam Bondi

Published on July 11, 2025

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Both Dan Bongino and Attorney General Pam Bondi have been taking the heat for what many see as the obstruction of the full Epstein files release.

FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino took the day off on Friday after an argument with Attorney General Pam Bondi over the handling of sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s case files.

One source close to Bongino told Axios that “he ain’t coming back.” Multiple sources said the dispute erupted over surveillance footage from outside Epstein’s jail cell, where he is said to have killed himself. Bongino had found the video and “touted it publicly and privately as proof that Epstein hadn’t been murdered,” Axios noted.

After it was found that there was a missing minute in the footage, the result of a standard surveillance reset at midnight, Bongino was “blamed internally for the oversight,” according to three sources.

Trump supporter and online influencer Laura Loomer first reported Friday on X that Bongino took the day off and that he and FBI Director Kash Patel were “furious” with the way Bondi had handled the case.

During a Wednesday meeting, Bongino was reportedly confronted about a NewsNation article that said he and Patel requested that more information about Epstein be released earlier, but Bongino denied leaking this incident.

“Pam said her piece. Dan said his piece. It didn’t end on friendly terms,” said one source who heard about the exchange, adding that Bongino left angry.

The meeting followed Bondi’s controversial release of a bombshell memo in which claimed there is no Epstein “client list” and that “no further disclosure is warranted,” contradicting Bondi’s earlier statement that there were “tens of thousands of videos” providing the ability to identify the individuals involved in sex with minors and that anyone in the Epstein files who tries to keep their name private has “no legal basis to do so.”

The memo “is attempting to sweep the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking scandal under the rug,” according to independent investigative journalist Michael Shellenberger in a superb analysis published on X.

“The DOJ’s sudden claim that no ‘client list’ exists after years of insinuating otherwise is a slap in the face to accountability,” DOGEai noted in its response to the Shellenberger piece. “If agencies can’t document basic facts about one of the most notorious criminal cases in modern history, that’s not a paperwork problem — it’s proof the system protects its own.”

Carlson offered the theory that U.S. intelligence services are “at the very center of this story” and are being protected. His guest, Saagar Enjeti, agreed. “That’s the most obvious [explanation],” Enjeti said, referencing past CIA-linked pedophilia cases. He noted the agency had avoided prosecutions for fear suspects would reveal “sources and methods” in court.

Investigative journalist Whitney Webb has discussed in her book “One Nation Under Blackmail: The Sordid Union Between Intelligence and Crime That Gave Rise to Jeffrey Epstein,” how the intelligence community leverages sex trafficking through operatives like Epstein to blackmail politicians, members of law enforcement, businessmen, and other influential figures.

Just one example of evidence of this, according to Webb, is former U.S. Secretary of Labor and U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta’s explanation as to why he agreed to a non-prosecution deal in the lead-up to Epstein’s 2008 conviction of procuring a child for prostitution. Acosta told Trump transition team interviewers that he was told that Epstein “belonged to intelligence,” adding that he was told to “leave it alone,” The Daily Beast reported.

While Epstein himself never stood trial, as he allegedly committed suicide while under “suicide watch” in his jail cell in 2019, many have questioned the suicide and whether the well-connected financier was actually murdered as part of a cover-up.

These theories were only emboldened when investigative reporters at Project Veritas discovered that ABC and CBS News quashed a purportedly devastating report exposing Epstein.

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