Update 3: Northwest Alberta wildfire (May 23 at 4:00 p.m.)

Lloyd Lewis

Published

7 years ago

10 minute read

May 23, 2019

Thunderstorms are forecast for Thursday and Friday with no precipitation. States of local emergency remain in effect, with residents under a mandatory evacuation order.

Current situation

The Chuckegg Creek Wildfire is burning approximately three kilometres south of the Town of High Level in Mackenzie County.
This out-of-control wildfire is almost 92,000 hectares.
Alberta Wildfire, Alberta Emergency Management Agency and local authorities are cooperating in the response.
Albertans should be prepared to be away from home longer than initially planned. Evacuees are asked to report to reception centres in Peace River, High Prairie, Grande Prairie, Slave Lake, Fort Vermilion and Hay River.
Firefighters are focusing efforts on containing the wildfire outside High Level. Yesterday, a break in conditions allowed a controlled burn between the wildfire and the town to consume materials that could have become fuel for the wildfire.
Peace River is reporting reduced visibility due to the smoke which is expected to stay until tomorrow.
Resources on the ground include about 143 wildland firefighters, 154 structural fighters and staff on the ground, supported by 28 helicopters, air tankers, 10 structural protection units and heavy machinery.
Continuing dry and windy conditions in most of Alberta have increased the danger of forest fires. Fire bans and off-highway vehicle restrictions are now in place for central and northern areas of the province.
Approximately 5,000 people have been evacuated from High Level and the neighbouring communities.
Mandatory evacuation orders are in place for the Town of High Level and parts of Mackenzie County south of High Level.
Dene Tha’ First Nation declared an evacuation order for Bushe River, Meander River and Chateh.
A voluntary evacuation is in place for Paddle Prairie Metis Settlement and areas north of High Level.
Alberta Health Services evacuated 15 patients from the Manning Community Health Centre due to smoke from the wildfires.
The emergency department at Manning Community Health Centre remains open.
Power, wireless services and gas have been restored to the Town of High Level, Mackenzie County and the Dene Tha’ First Nation.
Detailed information is available on emergency.alberta.ca, which is updated frequently.

Reception centres

Reception centres are open at:
- Slave Lake Legacy Centre (400 6 Avenue)
- High Prairie Sports Palace (5409 49 Street)
- Grande Prairie Regional College (10726 106 Avenue)
- Peace River Misery Mountain Ski Hill (10408 89 Street)
- La Crete Heritage Centre (25411 Township Road 1060, south of La Crete)
- Fort Vermilion Community Cultural Complex (5001 44 Avenue)
- Hay River Dene Wellness Centre
Residents are asked to please check in with a reception centre, even if they are staying with family or friends, or finding alternate accommodations.

Highway closures

Highway 35 remains closed between five kilometres and 30 kilometres south of High Level. Highway 697 and the La Crete Ferry is identified as a detour. La Crete Ferry is operational with wait times of approximately one hour.
Highway 58 from High Level to approximately 70 kilometres from the junction with Range Road 45A remains closed.

Insurance information

Evacuated residents should retain all their receipts for food purchases, accommodation and other related expenses to provide to their insurer for possible reimbursement.
Most home and tenant’s insurance policies provide reasonable coverage for living expenses during an evacuation. Contact your insurance company for details.
Albertans who cannot remember or reach their insurance provider, can contact the Insurance Bureau of Canada at 1-844-227-5422 or by email at [email protected]. Information to understand your fire insurance coverage is online at ibc.ca/ab/disaster/alberta-wildfire.

Justice and legal matters

High Level Court is closed. Call the Peace River Court at 780-624-6256 for inquiries on High Level Court matters scheduled for this week and next. All scheduled Fort Vermilion matters will be heard in Peace River. Call the Peace River Court at 780-624-6256 if you’re unable to register your name and phone number. Matters will be held by phone if necessary.
In many cases, tickets can be paid online. For any other inquiries requiring direction from the court about Peace River and Fort Vermilion court matters, call the Peace River Court at 780-624-6256.
If you have an appointment with a probation officer in an evacuated area, report to the community corrections office nearest you. If you do not know where the nearest one is, call 780-427-3109 (to call toll free, first dial 310-0000).
If you are an intermittent server in an evacuated area, call the Peace River Correctional Centre at 780-624-5480 (to call toll free, first dial 310-0000) for direction.

Air quality

Alberta Health Services has issued a special air quality statement.

Health

Mental health support is available by calling Alberta’s 24-hour Mental Health Help Line at 1-877-303-2642.

Post-secondary

Apprentices or journeypersons from the High Level area who have questions should call the Apprenticeship and Industry Training Information line at 1-800-248-4823, Monday through Friday, 8:15 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., or visit tradesecrets.gov.ab.ca.
Post-secondary students with questions about Alberta student loans can call 1-855-606-2096, or toll free in North America at 1-855-606-2096 Monday through Friday, 7:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m.

Pets and livestock

Residents who may have left their pets at home can call 780-926-2201. Volunteers can check on your pets.
Mackenzie County has stock trailers to assist with livestock transport. Visit highlevel.ca for more information

Donations and volunteers

The towns of High Level and Slave Lake are not accepting material donations and do not require volunteers at this time.
The Town of Slave Lake has set up an online form for offers http://www.slavelake.ca/FormCenter/Other-27/High-Level-Evacuation-Volunteer-Sign-Up-159.
Check the Mackenzie County Facebook page for an up-to-date list of donations needed and drop off locations.

Canada Post

Canada Post has suspended mail delivery services in the communities of High Level, Meander Creek, Chateh, Rainbow Lake, Zama City, Fort Vermilion, Manning and La Crete.
Mail will be held at the Edmonton depot until mail service resumes.
Check the Canada Post website for updates.

Income Support, Alberta Supports and AISH

Residents receiving benefits from the Assured Income for the Severely Handicapped (AISH) or the Income Support program by cheque rather than electronic deposit, and who are affected by the wildfire in High Level, can visit their nearest Alberta Supports Centres to pick up their cheque.
If you are in La Crete, you can pick up your cheque at the local reception centre. If you receive your benefits via direct deposit, your payment will be deposited as usual.
For information on child intervention and child care, residents may contact 1-800-638-0715.
If persons with developmental disabilities, their families or contracted service providers need human, financial, or in-kind assistance to connect with loved ones, find accommodations or provide assistance to individuals receiving PDD supports, please contact the nearest Alberta Supports Centre for assistance. You can find a list of Alberta Supports Centres online or you can call the Alberta Supports contact Centre at 1-800-232-7215 provincewide between 7:30 a.m. – 8 p.m., Monday to Friday.
For additional information on social benefits, affected individuals can contact Alberta Supports or call 1-877-644-9992, Monday to Friday from 7:30 a.m. to 8 p.m.

Health card

To get a replacement Health Care Insurance Card at no cost, you can contact 780-427-1432 or toll free at 310-0000 and then 780-427-1432 when prompted. Your Alberta Personal Health Card can be mailed to a temporary address.

Other information

Residents driving through the area should carry enough fuel as there may be shortages.

Public information

You can call 310-4455, open daily from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. for wildfire-related information.

Related information

Related Topics:Chuckegg Creek Wildfire feature

Up Next

WATCH: Unreserved Auction June 15 – Stunning property just west of Rimbey- Open House this Sunday 1-4 pm

Don't Miss

The 67th Street / 30 Avenue Roundabout will be a construction zone all summer!

President Todayville Inc., Honorary Colonel 41 Signal Regiment, Board Member Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Arts Award Foundation, Director Canadian Forces Liaison Council (Alberta) musician, photographer, former VP/GM CTV Edmonton.

Follow Author

41 Signal Regiment trains for winter survival at CFB Wainwright

Central Alberta / 3 years ago

Local artist records original song for Remembrance Day with video showcasing Red Deer’s military history

Community / 3 years ago

Glenn Anderson adds some colour to the “Day of Golf”

Business

There’s No Bias at CBC News, You Say? Well, OK…

Published on December 21, 2025

Todayville

The Audit

It’s been nearly a year since I last wrote about the CBC. In the intervening months, the Prescott memo on bias at the BBC was released, whose stunning allegations of systemic journalistic malpractice “inspired” multiple senior officials to leave the corporation. Given how the institutional bias driving problems at the BBC is undoubtedly widely shared by CBC employees, I’d be surprised if there weren’t similar flaws embedded inside the stuff we’re being fed here in Canada.

Apparently, besides receiving nearly two billion dollars¹ annually in direct and indirect government funding, CBC also employs around a third of all of Canada’s full time journalists. So taxpayers have a legitimate interest in knowing what we’re getting out of the deal.

Naturally, corporate president Marie-Philippe Bouchard has solemnly denied the existence of any bias in CBC reporting. But I’d be more comfortable seeing some evidence of that with my own eyes. Given that I personally can easily go multiple months without watching any CBC programming or even visiting their website, “my own eyes” will require some creative redefinition.

Subscribe to The Audit

So this time around I collected the titles and descriptions from nearly 300 stories that were randomly chosen from the CBC Top Stories RSS feed from the first half of 2025. You can view the results for yourself here. I then used AI tools to analyze the data for possible bias (how events are interpreted) and agendas (which events are selected). I also looked for:

Institutional viewpoint bias
Public-sector framing
Cultural-identity prioritization
Government-source dependency
Social-progressive emphasis

Here’s what I discovered.

Story Selection Bias

Millions of things happen every day. And many thousands of those might be of interest to Canadians. Naturally, no news publisher has the bandwidth to cover all of them, so deciding which stories to include in anyone’s Top Story feed will involve a lot of filtering. To give us a sense of what filtering standards are used at the CBC, let’s break down coverage by topic.

Of the 300 stories covered by my data, around 30 percent – month after month – focused on Donald Trump and U.S.- Canada relations. Another 12-15 percent related to Gaza and the Israel-Palestine conflict. Domestic politics – including election coverage – took up another 12 percent, Indigenous issues attracted 9 percent, climate and the environment grabbed 8 percent, and gender identity, health-care worker assaults, immigrant suffering, and crime attracted around 4 percent each.

Now here’s a partial list of significant stories from the target time frame (the first half of 2025) that weren’t meaningfully represented in my sample of CBC’s Top Stories:

Housing affordability crisis barely appears (one of the top voter concerns in actual 2025 polls).
Immigration levels and labour-market impact.
Crime-rate increases or policing controversies (unless tied to Indigenous or racialized victims).
Private-sector investment success stories.
Any sustained positive coverage of the oil/gas sector (even when prices are high).
Critical examination of public-sector growth or pension liabilities.
Chinese interference or CCP influence in Canada (despite ongoing inquiries in real life).
The rest of the known galaxy (besides Gaza and the U.S.)

Interpretation Bias

There’s an obvious pattern of favoring certain identity narratives. The Indigenous are always framed as victims of historic injustice, Palestinian and Gazan actions are overwhelmingly sympathetic, while anything done by Israelis is “aggression”. Transgender representation in uniformly affirmative while dissent is bigotry.

By contrast, stories critical of immigration policy, sympathetic to Israeli/Jewish perspectives, or skeptical of gender medicine are virtually non-existent in this sample.

That’s not to say that, in the real world, injustice doesn’t exist. It surely does. But a neutral and objective news service should be able to present important stories using a neutral and objective voice. That obviously doesn’t happen at the CBC.

Consider these obvious examples:

“Trump claims there are only ‘2 genders.’ Historians say that’s never been true” – here’s an overt editorial contradiction in the headline itself.
“Trump bans transgender female athletes from women’s sports” which is framed as an attack rather than a policy debate.

And your choice of wording counts more than you might realize. Verbs like “slams”, “blasts”, and “warns” are used almost exclusively describing the actions of conservative figures like Trump, Poilievre, or Danielle Smith, while “experts say”, “historians say”, and “doctors say” are repeatedly used to rebut conservative policy.

Similarly, Palestinian casualties are invariably “killed“ by Israeli forces – using the active voice – while Israeli casualties, when mentioned at all, are described using the passive voice.

Institutional Viewpoint Bias

A primary – perhaps the primary job – of a serious journalist is to challenge the government’s narrative. Because if journalists don’t even try to hold public officials to account, then no one else can. Even the valuable work of the Auditor General or the Parliamentary Budget Officer will be wasted, because there will be no one to amplify their claims of wrongdoing. And Canadians will have no way of hearing the bad news.

So it can’t be a good sign when around 62 percent of domestic political stories published by the nation’s public broadcaster either quote government (federal or provincial) sources as the primary voice, or are framed around government announcements, reports, funding promises, or inquiries.

In other words, a majority of what the CBC does involves providing stenography services for their paymasters.

Here are just a few examples:

“Federal government apologizes for ‘profound harm’ of Dundas Harbour relocations”
“Jordan’s Principle funding… being extended through 2026: Indigenous Services”
“Liberal government announces dental care expansion the day before expected election call”

Agencies like the Bank of Canada, Indigenous Services Canada, and Transportation Safety Board are routinely presented as authoritative and neutral. By contrast, opposition or industry critiques are usually presented as secondary (“…but critics say”) or are simply invisible. Overall, private-sector actors like airlines, oil companies, or developers are far more likely to be criticized.

All this is classic institutional bias: the state and its agencies are the default lens through which reality is filtered.

Not unlike the horrors going on at the BBC, much of this bias is likely unconscious. I’m sure that presenting this evidence to CBC editors and managers would evoke little more than blank stares. This stuff flies way below the radar.

But as one of the AI tools I used concluded:

In short, this 2025 CBC RSS sample shows a very strong and consistent left-progressive institutional bias both in story selection (agenda) and in framing (interpretation). The outlet functions less as a neutral public broadcaster and more as an amplifier of government, public-sector, and social-progressive narratives, with particular hostility reserved for Donald Trump, Canadian conservatives, and anything that could be construed as “right-wing misinformation.”

And here’s the bottom line from a second tool:

The data reveals a consistent editorial worldview where legitimate change flows from institutions downward, identity group membership is newsworthy, and systemic intervention is the default solution framework.

You might also enjoy:

Is Updating a Few Thousand Readers Worth a Half Million Taxpayer Dollars?

David Clinton

Jan 19

Is Updating a Few Thousand Readers Worth a Half Million Taxpayer Dollars?

Plenty has been written about the many difficulties faced by legacy news media operations. You might even recall reading about the troubled CBC and the Liberal government’s ill-fated Online News Act in these very pages. Traditional subscription and broadcast models are drying up, and on-line ad-based revenues are in sharp decline.

Read full story

1 Between the many often-ignored sources of funding that I itemize here, and the new funding announced in the recent budget, that old “$1.4 billion” number you hear all the time is badly outdated.

Subscribe to The Audit.

For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.

Daily Caller

Bari Weiss Reportedly Planning To Blow Up Legacy Media Giant

Published on November 22, 2025

Todayville

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Nicole Silverio

CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss is reportedly planning to dramatically change the network’s coverage to eliminate left-wing bias and make the newsroom more efficient.

Weiss has been handed a mandate for change by Paramount SkyDance’s David Ellison, the CEO of CBS News’ parent company, which bought her company, The Free Press, for $150 million, according to The Wall Street Journal (WSJ). Ellison wants Weiss to bring “news that reflects reality” and journalism that “doesn’t seek to demonize, but seeks to understand.”

“I wanna blow things up,” Weiss has reportedly told her colleagues during meetings.

During the hiring process, Weiss has reached out to outside talent directly rather than speaking to their agents, which is considered the traditional method of communication, according to the WSJ. She has also reportedly been highly involved in booking guests in an attempt to fix the network’s ratings and make a lasting change.

Weiss is focused on trying to reshape “CBS Evening News,” which has consistently ranked third place in comparison to the evening programs on ABC News and NBC News. “CBS Evening News” typically averages around 4 million total viewers. On the week of November 3, the program garnered 4.2 million total viewers and 564,000 viewers in the 25 to 54 key demographic, while “NBC Nightly News” and “ABC World News Tonight” averaged 7.2 million and 6.6 million total viewers, as well as 929,000 and 883,000 in the 25-54 demo, according to AdWeek.

John Dickerson, who currently hosts “CBS Evening News,” announced on Oct. 27 that he will be departing the network in January. Weiss has reportedly considered poaching CNN’s Anderson Cooper and Fox News’ Bret Baier, though Baier said he will remain at Fox News in the short-term since his contract goes through the end of 2028, according to the WSJ.

A source close to Cooper told the WSJ that the CNN host is not interested in hosting “CBS Evening News.”

“CBS Mornings” host Gayle King’s contract is up in early 2026, prompting Weiss to reportedly consider finding a cheaper alternative to her $15 million salary, according to WSJ.

The median age of viewers who watch CBS News is 58 years old, according to a Pew Research survey.

When she stepped into her role, Weiss sent emails to staff asking them to outline their jobs and provide feedback on “how we can make CBS News the most trusted news organization in America and the world.” Weiss said she would have had to “throw in the towel a very, very long time ago” if she were concerned about the negative press her decisions will receive.

Approximately 100 staffers were laid off once Weiss took over in October, which were part of Paramount’s layoffs of about 1,000 employees. The CBS News Race and Culture Unit, founded in July 2020, was completely wiped out as part of the layoffs.