Opinion
The City wants to discredit the province’s environment study, during an election year.
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.
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
I’ve written frequently here in recent years about the financial fiasco that has hit Ford Motor Company and other big U.S. carmakers who made the fateful decision to go in whole hog in 2021 to feed at the federal subsidy trough wrought on the U.S. economy by the Joe Biden autopen presidency. It was crony capitalism writ large, federal rent seeking on the grandest scale in U.S. history, and only now are the chickens coming home to roost.
Ford announced on Monday that it will be forced to take $19.5 billion in special charges as its management team embarks on a corporate reorganization in a desperate attempt to unwind the financial carnage caused by its failed strategies and investments in the electric vehicles space since 2022.
Cancelled is the Ford F-150 Lightning, the full-size electric pickup that few could afford and fewer wanted to buy, along with planned introductions of a second pricey pickup and fully electric vans and commercial vehicles. Ford will apparently keep making its costly Mustang Mach-E EV while adjusting the car’s features and price to try to make it more competitive. There will be a shift to making more hybrid models and introducing new lines of cheaper EVs and what the company calls “extended range electric vehicles,” or EREVs, which attach a gas-fueled generator to recharge the EV batteries while the car is being driven.
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“The $50k, $60k, $70k EVs just weren’t selling; We’re following customers to where the market is,” Farley said. “We’re going to build up our whole lineup of hybrids. It’s gonna be better for the company’s profitability, shareholders and a lot of new American jobs. These really expensive $70k electric trucks, as much as I love the product, they didn’t make sense. But an EREV that goes 700 miles on a tank of gas, for 90% of the time is all-electric, that EREV is a better solution for a Lightning than the current all-electric Lightning.”
It all makes sense to Mr. Farley, but one wonders how much longer the company’s investors will tolerate his presence atop the corporate management pyramid if the company’s financial fortunes don’t turn around fast.
To Ford’s and Farley’s credit, the company has, unlike some of its competitors (GM, for example), been quite transparent in publicly revealing the massive losses it has accumulated in its EV projects since 2022. The company has reported its EV enterprise as a separate business unit called Model-E on its financial filings, enabling everyone to witness its somewhat amazing escalating EV-related losses since 2022:
• 2022 – Net loss of $2.2 billion
• 2023 – Net loss of $4.7 billion
• 2024 – Net loss of $5.1 billion
Add in the company’s $3.6 billion in losses recorded across the first three quarters of 2025, and you arrive at a total of $15.6 billion net losses on EV-related projects and processes in less than four calendar years. Add to that the financial carnage detailed in Monday’s announcement and the damage from the company’s financial electric boogaloo escalates to well above $30 billion with Q4 2025’s damage still to be added to the total.
Ford and Farley have benefited from the fact that the company’s lineup of gas-and-diesel powered cars have remained strongly profitable, resulting in overall corporate profits each year despite the huge EV-related losses. It is also fair to point out that all car companies were under heavy pressure from the Biden government to either produce battery electric vehicles or be penalized by onerous federal regulations.
Now, with the Trump administration rescinding Biden’s harsh mandates and canceling the absurdly unattainable fleet mileage requirements, Ford and other companies will be free to make cars Americans actually want to buy. Better late than never, as they say, but the financial fallout from it all is likely just beginning to be made public.
- David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
President Trump on Tuesday ordered a “total and complete” blockade of all sanctioned oil tankers moving into or out of Venezuela, sharply escalating pressure on the socialist regime of Nicolás Maduro and framing the move as a national security response to terrorism, drug trafficking, and the theft of American assets.
In a Truth Social post, Trump announced that his administration has formally designated the Venezuelan regime a Foreign Terrorist Organization and directed U.S. forces to interdict sanctioned oil shipments tied to Caracas. He said Venezuela is now “completely surrounded by the largest Armada ever assembled in the History of South America,” adding that previously announced airspace restrictions remain in effect. Trump accused the Maduro government of using oil from “stolen Oil Fields” to finance “Drug Terrorism, Human Trafficking, Murder, and Kidnapping,” warning that the blockade will only expand until the regime returns “all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us.”
“For the theft of our Assets, and many other reasons, including Terrorism, Drug Smuggling, and Human Trafficking, the Venezuelan Regime has been designated a FOREIGN TERRORIST ORGANIZATION,” Trump wrote. “Therefore, today, I am ordering A TOTAL AND COMPLETE BLOCKADE OF ALL SANCTIONED OIL TANKERS going into, and out of, Venezuela.” Trump also tied the move to immigration enforcement, saying the “Illegal Aliens and Criminals that the Maduro Regime has sent into the United States during the weak and inept Biden Administration are being returned to Venezuela at a rapid pace,” and adding that America “will not allow Criminals, Terrorists, or other Countries, to rob, threaten, or harm our Nation.”
The announcement comes days after U.S. forces seized a sanctioned oil tanker off the Venezuelan coast, an incident that sparked an angry response from Caracas. Maduro denounced the seizure as piracy, comparing it to “Pirates of the Caribbean,” and, moments before Trump’s statement was released, called for a coordinated international protest by oil workers. Speaking at a regime event, Maduro urged labor groups and maritime organizations to mobilize against what he called U.S. “piracy,” saying the oil working class must defend Venezuela’s right to trade its main export in international forums.
Following Trump’s order, the Maduro regime issued an official statement condemning what it called an “irrational naval blockade” and accusing Washington of attempting to steal Venezuela’s national wealth. The statement said Venezuela’s ambassador to the United Nations would denounce the action and urged people in the United States and abroad to “reject this extravagant threat by any means necessary.” Trump’s move marks one of the most aggressive steps yet in his renewed confrontation with Maduro, signaling a willingness to use direct military and economic pressure to choke off the oil revenue that keeps the regime afloat.
(AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos)
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