City Notebook: We tend to fix problems through more of the same

By Collin Gallant on June 11, 2022.

Gotta problem? Well, think about it long enough, or get enough people involved and you’ll probably find the solution looks an awful lot like the problem, or vice versa, that the problem is the solution.

Studies have shown the more a person learns about an issue in the age of social media, the less they actually know. Contradictory as that is, it makes some sense (doesn’t it?) and provides an explanation of why major issues today tend to get bogged down in a sort of mass mental gridlock.

Without getting anyone’s dander up, a couple examples spring to mind, but it’s not limited to any one ideology.

Your homework this week is to pick an issue in the news and count the days until more of the same is suggested as the real way to reverse the problem.

Well said

Points of privilege are rarely noted in the press, but here is Coun. Ramona Robbins on last week’s observance of “Seniors Week in Alberta.”

“We all know seniors have been affected by the pandemic – it’s been a lonely time – and I’d encourage everyone who has a senior in their lives to celebrate them … call them up and tell they love them and you value them,” she told council on Monday.

What’s up out west

Lethbridge city council this week approved new money to study the potential of moving to a ward system to elect city councillors in 2023, with such a move kicked around by a couple candidates here every time Hatters go to the polls.

Another perennial discussion item, though a real third-rail, so to speak, is the move to full-time city councillors.

This council is already adding support staff for research and relations to the elected side of the local government equation. That coincides with the social media age when info requests and demands for actions to elected officials can fly fast and furious. Increasing cost of council salaries turned into a real knife fight a few years back, and we never really got a promised study on how local compensation compares to other cities.

Such moves are better handled with a mandate from voters (a Lethbridge plebiscite showed 55 per cent support for wards), and for fairness sake should be done before an election.

A referendum in Medicine Hat could piggy-back on the next provincial election, which is supposed to happen in May 2023 (more on this below).

Provincial politics

It is sincerely doubted that Albertans will be going to the polls in May 2023. Won’t a new UCP leader want COVID, Kenney and a cruddy economy to be smaller in the rear view mirror by six to nine months?

Or we might, considering that “new” is the most important word in advertising, and if there’s enough excitement about the new leader that doesn’t have the baggage of the last little while.

Also, not to be glib, but there are more than a half dozen candidates registered to replace Jason Kenney as leader, which is slightly more than the number of premiers who held office over the last 11 years in this province.

Do people really want this job?

A look ahead

It’ll be a bad day to be a ribbon Tuesday as a tour is planned for media and officials to open a host of stimulus projects completed during the pandemic throughout the city. That includes the Towne Square development in the city centre, a revamped Athletic Park and about a dozen other sites.

100 years ago

Canada’s Governor General, Lord and Lady Byng, had apparently accepted an invitation from local sports booster, Ald. Byron Bellamy, to visit Medicine Hat on a summer tour, the News crowed in early June 1922.

Bellamy, also the head of the Typographical Union at the News, wrote to their excellencies in the spring noting that the reigning Alberta champion “Typos” baseball team would be renamed the “Byngs” for the coming season.

An itinerary showed the head of state would stop in the Hat later in the month.

Natural gas in Calgary would provide a luxury to those citizens while the fuel provides the necessities of life and all industry in Medicine Hat, the News argued in an editorial. Court action was threatened by the Town of Redcliff and the City of Medicine Hat in opposition to a plan by Calgary Light and Power to exploit and pipe out local gas fields.

An Alberta Order in Council set in a new regulation for oil and gas wells, requiring holes be no less than 200 feet from the boundaries of a lease.

Charlie Chaplin was scouting locations in the Rocky Mountains during a recent mountain climbing expedition.

The CPR responded to calls for the Crowsnest Rates to be reopened in the negative, arguing that any relief through reducing them would have little effect on national inflation rates or the conditions throughout Canada.