City Notebook: Population

By COLLIN GALLANT on January 14, 2023.

cgallant@medicinehatnews.com@CollinGallant

You may have heard the population of Medicine Hat rose by 800 last year to sit above 80,000.

Huh? Isn’t it 63,000? Growth?

Well, it’s all a matter of perspective.

Figures released this week by Statistics Canada, and reported in the News, refer to the Medicine Hat “Census Amalgamation” area, which includes not only Hatters living within city limits, but the near region as well.

Add Redcliff, two growing hamlets nestling up to the urban area and the remainder of Cypress County, and you get the larger number.

Sometimes this is referred to as “trading area” but the gist is it captures people who use the city as a centre for school, employment, living, shopping, etc.

So, growth is typically positive, but, new figures also reveal a concerning negative trend.

For a second straight year, the number of births in Medicine Hat CA was fewer than the number of deaths. In the recent period that led to a “natural decline” of 139.

That ratio was negative 98 the previous year, and basically flat in 2019-2020.

That’s part of a continent-wide trend as the group known as baby boomers age.

There’s nothing that can be done about death, but we’ll leave up to the imagination on how to reverse the overall trend.

Those losses were made up for by people moving to the area from elsewhere in the province, other provinces and internationally.

Another interesting note from the data is that during the natural gas boom year of 2005, nearly 1,200 people moved to Medicine Hat from other parts of the province.

In bust years, like 2009 and 2015, a net number of Hatters left the city.

Reorg

City council may be soon discuss greenlighting another organizational review.

That could be limited to figuring out what an economic development office looks like in the future. As far as the public knows it’s been a zombie office since officials left early last year.

But could it touch deeper? Into the very vague discussion points from the last budget debate about how promised cost savings from a much heralded 2021 redealing of the city hall deck did not produce the expected savings?

Quick ones

– Medicine Hat city officials were scheduled to have a formal sit-down with Premier Danielle Smith last week, but the results of which aren’t yet for public consumption. As well, a birdie says the premier did a tour of the Methanex facility, but in terms of “public” events in town for Smith, we’re not sure.

– In case you’re wondering, campaign finances reports from the local byelection last November are due March 8.

– Also for calendar, the hearing into the city’s plan to build a new southwest quadrant substation is set to begin Jan. 23. A number of Cypress County residents nearby are objecting.

– Wild About Harry? We’re told more than 20 patrons of the Medicine Hat Public Library are on a “hold” list for the autobiography of Prince Harry that was released this week.

A look ahead

City council sits on Monday, and further ahead, the annual State of the City luncheon put on by the Kiwanis Club and Chamber of Commerce is set to take place Jan. 24 at the Medicine Hat Lodge.

100 years ago

Helium from Bow Island was liquefied in a university laboratory, the News reported on Jan. 10, 1923, noting the remarkable breakthrough could lead to substantial gains in refrigeration and air travel.

Minute quantities of helium had been subjected to such experiments in 1908 in Holland, but scarcity and cost ($1,500 for one cubic foot) had limited research.

In 1919, University of Toronto professor J. Cunningham McLennan theorized that quantities were available in natural gas wells of the Bow Island Field. now, his extraction and liquefaction plants could provide the gas at 10-cents per cubic foot.

A delegation from Redcliff and Medicine Hat headed to Calgary to petition the head of the CNR, Sir Henry Thornton, to complete the Hanna-to-Hat rail line that had been promised before the start of the Great War.

At its AGM in the Hat, the Alberta Federation of Labor called for a new referendum to allow the sale of beer and light wine in the province. That would seek to reverse a successful prohibition vote years earlier.

Former Calgary Mayor H.A. Sinnott was sentenced to seven years in jail for misappropriating $1,400 from a client of his private law practice.

About 1,000 members of the U.S. Eighth Infantry would be transferred home from Germany, marking an end to the U.S. army presence in the defeated nation.

Collin Gallant covers city politics and a variety of topics for the News. Reach him at 403-528-5664 or via email at cgallant@medicinehatnews.com