Opinion
10 years later and the city is presenting the same old 2 options, of possible Aquatic Centre locations.

10 years ago the thinking was to build the Aquatic Centre by the recreation centre downtown or by the Michener pool. Committees were struck, consultants hired and time lapsed and nothing changed. The options our city bureaucrats are offering council to consider hasn’t changed.
I have never seen more lack-lustre, vision less proposal options. All our pools will remain within a good walk of each other. They will all be south of the river and east of 40 Ave. One proposal will have it down the road from the Collicutt Centre and the other would have it downtown with traffic issues. The budget means little because there will be other budgets for traffic, lighting, and demolition that won’t be discussed.
The pools are slated for construction in 10 years. They are also planning on opening the land north of 11a for another 25,000 residents, but the pool will be built near current pools on the other side of the city. When they started thinking about the south-east developments, they built the Collicutt Ctr. and 2 high schools and we never looked back.
Now it looks like we may end up with 5 high schools and 2 Aquatic recreational centres along 30 ave.
I could see the city approving the design, but they should table the vote on location because I believe they are too narrowly focused on the immediate time frame. The city once talked about keeping the Westerner downtown, but someone persuasive had the vision to move it away from downtown. We need that person now.
Perhaps they could table this for another council? A new council will be elected in October, 10 months away for something being built in 10 years.
I have been lobbying to build the Aquatic Centre on Hazlett Lake. Lethbridge built facilities on Henderson Lake, in fact they made Henderson Lake and now they have a widely popular tourist attraction in Henderson Lake Park.
Our Hazlett Lake is visible to QE2 and 11A, surrounded by farmland. The city wants to develop it. Why not replicate the Collicutt growth starter.
Why is it, our city has such limited vision? Why must everything be built downtown? Can you imagine if they had kept the westerner grounds downtown?
Am I the only one that sees tourism potential, stay-cation potential, growth potential? Anyone?
Frontier Centre for Public Policy
John Rustad’s Residential School Claim Is False And Dangerous

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
When politicians misrepresent facts or historical events, whether out of ignorance or political expediency, they do a disservice to the truth and public trust. On Feb. 24, 2025, B.C. Conservative Party Leader John Rustad reportedly told Global News that “more than 4,000 children did not return home” from residential schools because “those children died in residential schools.” As researcher Nina Green points out, this statement is demonstrably false and contradicts the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) final report.
Sadly, Rustad is not the only one making such claims. Similar statements, portrayed as facts, are repeated by politicians who should know better.
The truth, according to the TRC, is that 423 named children died on the premises of residential schools between 1867 and 2000. That is a tragedy, and we must expand our understanding of how and why these deaths occurred. To learn from tragedies, we must acknowledge and reflect on them. But to truly understand, we must accept what is true rather than bending or distorting it. Repeating the claim that “more than 4,000” children died in residential schools, as Rustad and others have uncritically reported, misrepresents reality.
The vastly inflated number, according to Green, originates from the University of Manitoba’s National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR), which has misrepresented the data by including children who died after leaving school—in hospitals, in accidents at home, and even well into adulthood. This distortion has led to widespread misrepresentation, misleading policymakers and the public.
Why does this matter?
Canada’s history with Indigenous residential schools is deeply painful. Abuses, neglect and forced assimilation were real in many instances. However, distorting the facts about residential school deaths promotes a false narrative of genocide that does not serve justice—in fact, this false narrative undermines it. If reconciliation means anything, it must be built on truth, not contrived political narratives.
By repeating the claim that more than 4,000 children died at residential schools, Rustad is spreading falsehoods and stoking division. This figure has been used to justify claims of mass graves, leading to international headlines and widespread outrage that harm present generations of Indigenous people. Yet, nearly four years after the first claims of unmarked graves, no remains have been excavated or verified.
Rustad is not a private citizen—he is a public figure whose words carry weight. As such, he is responsible for ensuring that the information he disseminates is accurate. Rustad is failing in his duty to the public. Depending on his motivation, he contributes to a culture in which historical accuracy is sacrificed for political expediency.
Some may argue that the exact number of students who died at residential schools is not important. But truth is not negotiable. If we accept exaggerated claims in one instance, we set a dangerous pattern for historical distortions. The truth should not be ideological or political.
If Rustad is serious about Indigenous issues, he should demand transparency from the University of Manitoba and its NCTR. Instead of accepting misleading figures, he should call for the full release of the TRC records, as was promised in 2013.
Leaders like Rustad must be held accountable. Falsehoods, no matter how well-intentioned, do not advance reconciliation. They erode trust, divide Canadians, and ultimately undermine the cause they claim to support. All Canadians deserve much better.
Marco Navarro-Genie is the vice president of research at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. With Barry Cooper, he is coauthor of Canada’s COVID: The Story of a Pandemic Moral Panic (2023).
Courageous Discourse
March 2020 Intel Brief to PM Johnson: “COVID-19 WAS ENGINEERED IN WUHAN INSTITUTE OF VIROLOGY”

By John Leake
Briefing from former head of SIS and other top security analysts stated unequivocally that pandemic originated at WIV, refuted fraudulent “Proximal Origins” paper by Andersen et al.
Fellow Substack author Michael Schellenberger just shared an intelligence briefing dated 27 March 2020 from Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of British intelligence, and other ranking security analysts to Prime Minister Johnson. The following is a reproduction of the first page.
In other words, Sir Richard and his team expressly told Prime Minister Boris Johnson on March 27, 2020 that SARS-CoV-2 came out of the WIV.
Note that the authors state that the Nature Medicine paper published by Andersen et al. (“The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2”) is incorrect and that:
the scale and nature of its errors and its prime source (Zhou et al) raise important further non-virological questions, including of geo-strategic and domestic security, that can be addressed separately in slower time.
We judge therefore, that the PRC [People’s Republic of China] is conducting information operation to embed the natural causation narrative, and, by misdirection, and to conceal the true origin and responsibility.
We know from Andersen et al.’s private e-mail correspondence with Anthony Fauci in late February 2020 that they knew that SARS-CoV-2 was not of natural origin.
This raises an extremely pressing question: Were Kristian G. Andersen, Andrew Rambaut, W. Ian Lipkin, Edward C. Holmes, Robert F. Garry, and Anthony Fauci working for the PRC?
Sir Richard Dearlove and his colleagues raise this suspicion, because they must have known that Andersen et al. weren’t simply hoodwinked by Chinese virologists Zhou et al.
We know that Peter Daszak of EcoHealth and Professor Ralph Baric were collaborating with Chinese scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and that Anthony Fauci’s NIAID was supporting their research as well.
Setting aside questions about the legality of their research, shouldn’t all of these people be arrested and tried for the fraudulent concealment of information of vital public interest?
Prime Minister Boris Johnson chose to conceal from the British public the reality disclosed in this memo. Does British law make him immune from liability for concealing this matter of vital public interest from the British people? Note that Johnson also took decisive action to sabotage peace talks between Ukraine and Russian in Turkey in March 2022.
Should the British people trust Johnson’s representations about the conflict between Ukraine and Russia—representations that have been endorsed by his successor, Keir Starmer? For all the British people know, Johnson received security briefings about this conflict that contradict what he has told them about the war.
Then there’s the abominable mainstream media in the U.S. and Britain that characterized everyone who pointed out the obvious indications of the lab origin as “conspiracy theorists.”
The New York Times just published an ass-covering Opinion titled “We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives”—as though the Times editors someone managed to remain ignorant about the mountain of evidence of this until now.
The disclosure of this British intelligence memo comes on the heels of almost identical disclosures about the German government of Angela Merkel. As investigative journalist Michael Nevradakis just reported in the CHD Defender:
Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, the BND, determined with 80%-95% certainty in 2020 that the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic originated with a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China — but successive governments kept the information “under lock and key,” according to a German investigative report.
The report, published jointly on Wednesday by Die Zeit and Süddeutsche Zeitung, was the result of an 18-month investigation.
The investigation found that in 2020, then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel commissioned a BND operation code-named “Project Saaremaa” that targeted Chinese agencies and research institutions.
When the BND’s investigation concluded that a Wuhan lab leak was the most likely source of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Merkel government prohibited the spy agency from releasing its results to the public.
When Mr. Nevradakis asked me what I thought about the German disclosure, I told him the following:
The revelation that German intelligence knew that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from a lab, and was not of natural origin, is no surprise, given the vast amount of evidence that the pathogen was not zoonotic. It’s also not surprising that the Merkel government decided to conceal the spy agency’s findings.
The BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst) has long worked very closely with the CIA, and the Merkel government consistently complied with Washington’s directives. Concealment of the lab origin of SARS-CoV-2 is consistent with the German government’s concealment of Paul Ehrlich Institute’s assessments about many elements of the COVID-19 pandemic.
For over three years, Dr. Peter McCullough and I have expressed our conviction that the cover-up of the lab origin of SARS-CoV-2 is the greatest organized crime in history. The latest revelations about the BND and the Merkel government confirm our long held suspicions.
For a full copy of the March 27, 2020 Security Briefing to Prime Minister Johnson, click HERE.
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