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Is Red Deer on the road to insignificance as hinted at by Alberta Health Services?

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Is Red Deer on the road to insignificance?
There have been many signals that Red Deer is not a player in this millennium.
Population decline while the county and neighbouring communities are growing. Alberta Health Services has once again taken Red Deer off the priority list. The next high school will be built in Blackfalds. Stars Lottery has a 2018 dream home prize in Calgary, Edmonton and Lethbridge but not in Red Deer like they had in other years.
Federally Red Deer has been broken up into 2 different electoral districts based out of rural centers. The city had been slow to react to federal plans to split the city and was unconvincing at the 11th hour to prevent it.
Last year we found out our city’s population declined by 975, while Blackfald,s population grew by 700. Did we stop to think or did we just blame the province? The province took the blame, even though the province grew during this period as did Penhold, Sylvan Lake and the county.
Blackfalds, 4 years ago, invested in the Abbey Recreation Centre and the town saw rapid growth. Something like 26% growth while Red Deer has only grown around 1.5% in that time frame. Blackfalds is moving forward on twinning their Multi-Plex to the tune of $12 million. Remember this is 4 years after opening their $15 million Abbey Centre.
The city of Red Deer is delaying discussing building an Aquatic Centre, 16 years after opening the Collicutt Centre.
Blackfalds, population of 9,916 will spend $1,210 per person twinning their multi-plex just 4 years after spending $2,000 per person on the Abbey Centre. 2013 population of Blackfalds was around 7,500.
In just a few years Blackfalds has committed about $3,000 per resident on recreational facilities.
Red Deer, population 99,832 is looking at spending less than $1,000 per resident on recreational facilities in decades.
Blackfalds has the fastest growing population in Canada.
Red Deer is abdicating it’s leadership role in Central Alberta. Penhold, Sylvan Lake and Blackfalds have all invested in their recreational facilities in recent years and have maintained population growth while Red Deer has ceased investing in new facilities, and seen a decline in population.
Red Deer Taxpayers Association have repeatedly acknowledged that Red Deer needs an Aquatic Centre with a 50 metre pool. During next year’s Canada Games which Red Deer is hosting, swimming events requiring a 50m pool will be held in Calgary. We should have built the pool years ago, as it has been almost 17 years since we built the Collicutt Centre’s pools.
We are known nationally for poor air, and high crime but we are nowhere on the lists of health care priorities, or best place to retire, so are we on the road to insignificance? Some one needs to ask.

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Eco-radical Canadian Cabinet minister resigns after oil deal approved

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From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

Steven Guilbeault, a Quebec MP who had formerly served as Justin Trudeau’s Minister of Environment, said he was leaving the Cabinet because his ‘climate’ policies were being abandoned.

One of Canada’s most radical environmentalist politicians has resigned from Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Cabinet.

Steven Guilbeault, until recently the Culture Minister, quit his position after the federal government struck a deal with the province of Alberta that relaxes environmental regulations and allows the construction of a new oil pipeline.

On Thursday, November 27, Guilbeault, a Quebec MP who had served as former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Minister of Environment, said he was stepping down because his “climate” policies were being abandoned.

“This afternoon, it is with great sadness that I submitted my resignation to the Prime Minister as Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture and Minister responsible for Official Languages, Minister of Nature and Parks Canada, as well as his Lieutenant in Quebec,” he said in a statement.

“When I entered politics, it was because I had a deep conviction that I could make a difference in fighting climate change and protecting our environment. My commitment to leaving a better world for the future of our children and our planet remains unchanged.”

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and Prime Minister Mark Carney signed on Thursday a memorandum of understanding (MOU) which will let Alberta build an oil pipeline to the coast of British Columbia. It also lessens tanker restrictions and allows Albertan oil to be sold on Asian markets. The pipeline still faces opposition from British Columbia’s ruling New Democratic Party government. 

The MOU agreement changes a host of other green-related initiatives that Guilbeault had a hand in, such as imposing an emissions cap on the oil and gas sector and new Clean Electricity Regulations. Under the deal, Alberta will be exempt from these radical environmental regulations.

Premier Smith has been battling Guilbeault over his extreme climate change policies for years now. She said of the recent MOU that, although it’s a “massive win for Alberta and Canada, we will still hold the federal government accountable for keeping their end of the bargain.”

“There’s a lot of work left to do so let’s roll up our sleeves and get the job done, Alberta!” she stated.

Smith has repeatedly defended Alberta from Trudeau-era climate regulations and asserted Alberta’s right to control its power grid, also promising the province will not be “transitioning away” from oil and natural gas. She had called on the then-prime minster to replace Guilbeault because he was too “extreme.” Last year, Smith blasted the Minister after he said the federal government would no longer fund road construction projects and instead funnel the savings to “climate change” projects.

Alberta does have support from the Supreme Court, however, which recently sided in favor of provincial autonomy when it comes to natural resources. The Supreme Court ruled that Trudeau’s law, C-69, dubbed the “no-more pipelines” bill, is “mostly unconstitutional.” This was a huge win for Alberta and Saskatchewan, who challenged the law in court. The decision returned authority over the pipelines to provincial governments, meaning oil and gas projects headed up by the provinces should be allowed to proceed without federal intrusion.

Guilbeault’s extreme eco-activist past

Guilbeault, under Trudeau’s watch, pushed a radical environmental agenda similar to the World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset” and the United Nations’ “Sustainable Development Goals.”

He was as extreme as they come for an environment minister, and his background shows a history of breaking the law for ideological aims. In 1997, he joined Greenpeace and served for a time as a director and then campaign manager of its Quebec chapter for a decade.

He was arrested many times for environmental protests, the most famous arrest coming after an incident in 2001 when he climbed Toronto’s CN Tower with British activist Chris Holden. The pair hung a banner saying “Canada and Bush — Climate Killers.”

Greenpeace is a group that advocates for population control in addition to calling for an end to all oil and gas.

His extreme ideals continued in his role as environment minister. He threatened Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe, who said that his province would no longer collect a federally imposed carbon tax on electric heat in addition to natural gas, with arrest and jail.

While Minister of Environment, Guilbeault was hoped to create a new “global’ carbon tax applied to all goods shipped internationally that could further drive-up prices for families already struggling with inflated costs.

The reduction and eventual elimination of the use of so-called “fossil fuels” and a transition to unreliable “green” energy has also been pushed by the World Economic Forum – the globalist group behind the socialist “Great Reset” agenda – an organization in which Trudeau and some of his cabinet have been involved.

The reality of  Trudeau’s, and then Carney’s push, for so-called renewable energy showed itself just over a month ago when Alberta’s power grid faced near certain collapse due to a failure of wind and solar power.  

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Daily Caller

John Kerry Lurches Back Onto Global Stage For One Final Gasp

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By David Blackmon

John Kerry, one of the grandest and most persistent climate scolds of the 21stcentury, lurched back into the news this week when he was knighted by Britain’s King Charles, a prominent climate scold in his own right.

In fact, their shared efforts involving flying off on carbon-spewing private jets to lecture the masses to live smaller, more costly lives in the name of fighting climate change was the motivation for the award, as the King thanked Kerry for his “services to tackling climate change.” That seems to be a bit of a grammatical error, but when royalty is involved, no one really cares, do they?

“King Charles and I share the same point of view — that there’s an urgency to doing things,” Kerry told the Globe in an interview. “He’s been ahead of most folks on this from the time I can remember… He always had a commitment to nature.”

Unfortunately for the U.K.’s citizens, the Labour government’s “commitment to nature” mainly appears to involve covering thousands of acres of bucolic British farmland with massive solar arrays and felling thousands of forest trees to make home to big wind installations these days.

Projects like those – frequently forced by the central government on objecting rural communities – form the centerpiece of Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero Ed Miliband’s program to deindustrialize the formerly formidable British economy.

That program – based on the shared philosophy of King Charles and Kerry – has sent the U.K.’s utility rates skyrocketing to the highest on earth. It has also rendered the former global power dependent on imports from foreign nations for its energy security, with China the most prominent among them.

Such are the fruits of the King Charles/Kerry “point of view.” Most would agree with Kerry’s statement that “there’s an urgency to doing things.” The problem is that pretty much everything he and the King have been doing in this realm across the first quarter of the 21st century leads inevitably to serfdom to the Chinese Communist Party.

In an interview with the Financial Times the same day, Kerry repeated much of the tiresome dogma of his alarmist religion, in the process excoriating President Donald Trump as a “denier” and calling U.S. corporate leaders cowards for straying from the narrative he and the King prefer.  “It is not that they don’t believe [in climate change] or they don’t want to move forward. They are just scared,” Kerry said of the corporate CEOs, adding, “The process of Donald Trump in the last months, coupled with the justice department, coupled with his vengeance programs, has scared… a lot of people.”

But a more believable alternative explanation for the shift away from the twin manias of ESG and DEI by many companies in recent years is that these corporate leaders have a fiduciary duty to maximize returns on capital to their investors. The problem for Kerry and his disciples is that the preferred alternatives they have advanced too often devolved into unprofitable boondoggles that fail to satisfy that duty. Kerry wants to place the entire blame on Trump – who, ironically, was recently honored by King Charles himself with an unprecedented second state dinner. But the truth is that shift started in earnest in 2023, when Joe Biden’s autopen was still in charge of the ship of American state.

That shift has certainly accelerated this year, as companies have been freed from the incessant hectoring of the Biden government and are now being denied access to the ruinous green subsidies from the IRA that so radically distorted energy markets. This has little to do with climate denialism or cowardice and much to do with sound business practice and CEOs properly carrying out the mandates of their high positions. No amount of hyperbolic talking points from Kerry or the King can change that reality.

In the end, Kerry’s remarks come off as a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing. Now in the twilight of his career, he has become a relic, a totem of a fading global religion whose end cannot come soon enough.

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.

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