Discovery Centre rolls into Capstone

The City of Red Deer, Land & Economic Development team publicly launched a real estate presentation centre for the Capstone community redevelopment program. The presentation centre has been designed specifically to educate and engage Red Deerians and Central Albertans on the vision of the community and its importance to the vitality and sustainability of downtown Red Deer. The opening marks a new era in the transformation of the area into a master planned urban village in the heart of downtown Red Deer.

While traditional ‘bricks and mortar’ real estate centres are still common practice in community development, The City of Red Deer took a more innovative approach to sharing the vision of the Capstone redevelopment, by converting a decommissioned transit bus into a discovery centre.

Named the Capstone Discovery Bus, the mobile real estate centre allows The City a unique opportunity to travel throughout Red Deer and into smaller areas to broaden interest for and educate on the community vision. Civic celebrations, annual festivals and cultural performances will be regular stops when the bus is not at its main stop near Canada 150 Square inside Capstone.

“Having a community presentation centre that engages and educates the public is a vital part of real estate development as it supports storytelling, which ultimately affects a buying decision,” said Mayor Ken Johnston. “It gives future residents and real estate prospects a sampling of how the community will look, feel, and behave. Importantly, it addresses how the community will meet the needs of its residents.”

Capstone is quite unique in its design and development intentions and represents a new type of community for Red Deer. The vision for Capstone is a mixed use, multi-family community in which 5,000 residents will one day live in some 2,000 condominiums, apartments, and townhomes. Its’ location on the Red Deer River, west of the downtown, means Capstone is both a prime riverside address and an accessible city home.

“The success of the Capstone redevelopment program underpins the future health and vitality of our downtown core,” City Manager, Tara Lodewyk. ‘Our city is expected to grow by approximately 20,000 new residents over the next 10-12 years and accommodating some of this population growth in Capstone is good news for our downtown businesses and services. We have planned for the highest and best use of the lands in Capstone to accommodate for our growth.”

City Manager Tara Lodewyk joins Mayor Johnston and Councillors Buruma, Dawe, and Lee at Capstone Discovery Bus Ribbon Cutting Ceremony

The interior spaces and displays of the remodeled city bus have been meticulously designed to portray the Capstone vision. Within its tiny 280 square foot footprint, the Capstone Discover Bus allows visitors to experience a typical day-in-the-community. An urban condo, a brew pub, a micro grocery store, and a mini park space all come together to describe the personality and built form of the neighbourhood. A 3-D model, depicting the community at full build-out, will be delivered digitally and will orient the visitor to the lands of Capstone, while highlighting the future density ambitions and design aesthetic.

Extensive research was done on the wants and needs of the future resident, and young working professionals and older adults have identified as most interested in calling Capstone home. With nearby retail services and amenities, including an expanded regional hospital, the future Capstone citizen is seeking a community which not only satisfies their social and recreational needs but also offers beautifully appointed and designed homes.

The Capstone Discovery Bus is free of charge to the public and is open 12 – 6 p.m. Thursday through Sunday and on holiday Mondays. No reservation is needed; the public is invited to find us in Capstone and throughout the downtown core this summer. Follow us at #liveincapstone.

Related Topics:#CapstoneDiscoveryBus #CapstoneDiscoveryCentre #DiscoveryCentre #MayorKenJohnston #TaraLodewyk feature

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Worst kept secret—red tape strangling Canada’s economy

Published on February 22, 2025

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Matthew Lau

In the past nine years, business investment in Canada has fallen while increasing more than 30 per cent in the U.S. on a real per-person basis. Workers in Canada now receive barely half as much new capital per worker than in the U.S.

According to a new Statistics Canada report, government regulation has grown over the years and it’s hurting Canada’s economy. The report, which uses a regulatory burden measure devised by KPMG and Transport Canada, shows government regulatory requirements increased 2.1 per cent annually from 2006 to 2021, with the effect of reducing the business sector’s GDP, employment, labour productivity and investment.

Specifically, the growth in regulation over these years cut business-sector investment by an estimated nine per cent and “reduced business start-ups and business dynamism,” cut GDP in the business sector by 1.7 percentage points, cut employment growth by 1.3 percentage points, and labour productivity by 0.4 percentage points.

While the report only covered regulatory growth through 2021, in the past four years an avalanche of new regulations has made the already existing problem of overregulation worse.

The Trudeau government in particular has intensified its regulatory assault on the extraction sector with a greenhouse gas emissions cap, new fuel regulations and new methane emissions regulations. In the last few years, federal diktats and expansions of bureaucratic control have swept the auto industry, child care, supermarkets and many other sectors.

Again, the negative results are evident. Over the past nine years, Canada’s cumulative real growth in per-person GDP (an indicator of incomes and living standards) has been a paltry 1.7 per cent and trending downward, compared to 18.6 per cent and trending upward in the United States. Put differently, if the Canadian economy had tracked with the U.S. economy over the past nine years, average incomes in Canada would be much higher today.

Also in the past nine years, business investment in Canada has fallen while increasing more than 30 per cent in the U.S. on a real per-person basis. Workers in Canada now receive barely half as much new capital per worker than in the U.S., and only about two-thirds as much new capital (on average) as workers in other developed countries.

Consequently, Canada is mired in an economic growth crisis—a fact that even the Trudeau government does not deny. “We have more work to do,” said Anita Anand, then-president of the Treasury Board, last August, “to examine the causes of low productivity levels.” The Statistics Canada report, if nothing else, confirms what economists and the business community already knew—the regulatory burden is much of the problem.

Of course, regulation is not the only factor hurting Canada’s economy. Higher federal carbon taxes, higher payroll taxes and higher top marginal income tax rates are also weakening Canada’s productivity, GDP, business investment and entrepreneurship.

Finally, while the Statistics Canada report shows significant economic costs of regulation, the authors note that their estimate of the effect of regulatory accumulation on GDP is “much smaller” than the effect estimated in an American study published several years ago in the Review of Economic Dynamics. In other words, the negative effects of regulation in Canada may be even higher than StatsCan suggests.

Whether Statistics Canada has underestimated the economic costs of regulation or not, one thing is clear: reducing regulation and reversing the policy course of recent years would help get Canada out of its current economic rut. The country is effectively in a recession even if, as a result of rapid population growth fuelled by record levels of immigration, the GDP statistics do not meet the technical definition of a recession.

With dismal GDP and business investment numbers, a turnaround—both in policy and outcomes—can’t come quickly enough for Canadians.

Matthew Lau

Adjunct Scholar, Fraser Institute

Business

‘Out and out fraud’: DOGE questions $2 billion Biden grant to left-wing ‘green energy’ nonprofit`

Published on February 22, 2025

Todayville

From LifeSiteNews

By Calvin Freiburger

The EPA under the Biden administration awarded $2 billion to a ‘green energy’ group that appears to have been little more than a means to enrich left-wing activists.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under the Biden administration awarded $2 billion to a “green energy” nonprofit that appears to have been little more than a means to enrich left-wing activists such as former Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams.

Founded in 2023 as a coalition of nonprofits, corporations, unions, municipalities, and other groups, Power Forward Communities (PFC) bills itself as “the first national program to finance home energy efficiency upgrades at scale, saving Americans thousands of dollars on their utility bills every year.” It says it “will help homeowners, developers, and renters swap outdated, inefficient appliances with more efficient and modernized options, saving money for years ahead and ensuring our kids can grow up with cleaner, pollutant-free air.”

The organization’s website boasts more than 300 member organizations across 46 states but does not detail actual activities. It does have job postings for three open positions and a form for people to sign up for more information.

The Washington Free Beacon reported that the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) project, along with new EPA administrator Lee Zeldin, are raising questions about the $2 billion grant PFC received from the Biden EPA’s National Clean Investment Fund (NCIF), ostensibly for the “affordable decarbonization of homes and apartments throughout the country, with a particular focus on low-income and disadvantaged communities.”

PFC’s announcement of the grant is the organization’s only press release to date and is alarming given that the organization had somehow reported only $100 in revenue at the end of 2023.

“I made a commitment to members of Congress and to the American people to be a good steward of tax dollars and I’ve wasted no time in keeping my word,” Zeldin said. “When we learned about the Biden administration’s scheme to quickly park $20 billion outside the agency, we suspected that some organizations were created out of thin air just to take advantage of this.” Zeldin previously announced the Biden EPA had deposited the $20 billion in a Citibank account, apparently to make it harder for the next administration to retrieve and review it.

“As we continue to learn more about where some of this money went, it is even more apparent how far-reaching and widely accepted this waste and abuse has been,” he added. “It’s extremely concerning that an organization that reported just $100 in revenue in 2023 was chosen to receive $2 billion. That’s 20 million times the organization’s reported revenue.”

Daniel Turner, executive director of energy advocacy group Power the Future, told the Beacon that in his opinion “for an organization that has no experience in this, that was literally just established, and had $100 in the bank to receive a $2 billion grant — it doesn’t just fly in the face of common sense, it’s out and out fraud.”

Prominent among PFC’s insiders is Abrams, the former Georgia House minority leader best known for persistent false claims about having the state’s gubernatorial election stolen from her in 2018. Abrams founded two of PFC’s partner organizations (Southern Economic Advancement Project and Fair Count) and serves as lead counsel for a third group (Rewiring America) in the coalition. A longtime advocate of left-wing environmental policies, Abrams is also a member of the national advisory board for advocacy group Climate Power.