City Notebook: Mother Nature still the best snow-clearing plan

By COLLIN GALLANT on February 4, 2023.

cgallant@medicinehatnews.com@CollinGallant

Ground Hog day is a hoax, this column has argued in the past, a mass delusion that spring could begin in Canada on February 2.

Or is it?

The local grumble over the size of pot holes on the ice floes about town subsided on Friday as 10C chinook weather blew into the region.

It adds some billow to the sails of city staffers who argued that adding residential street clearing would be costly, and too costly considering that chinooks largely perform the service free of charge.

File under doubtful

“Don’t believe everything you read,” is a good rule of thumb.

Last week this column included an historical note that a man became his own grandfather, according to a 1923 newspaper report.

It’s beyond confusing how such a thing would happen, but the idea strikes a chord, and maybe even reminds one of the novelty country and western song from the mid-1940s along the same lines.

In it, a man marries a woman whose daughter later marries the man’s father. That makes his mother-in-law his step-daughter and himself his own step son.

Both women have babies, and away we go.

But the whole idea is apparently based on a Mark Twain passage from decades before the 1923 newspaper report.

Several newspaper reports in the late 1800s and early 1900s proclaimed similar events, but none were verified, according to a few published examinations by this reporter.

A lesson is that a good con artist can exhausts a mark before they can figure out exactly what’s going on.

Hockey talk

A sellout for Sunday’s game at Co-op Place strains the memory for an equally packed WHL hockey contest since, perhaps opening night of the event centre in 2015.

The grand event comes after several calls in this column for Hatters to give this year’s Tigers team a look-see. They’re much improved from the cellar-dwelling squad of 2021-22, and this weekend’s two games (Lethbridge is in town Saturday) could have a lot to say about whether the team sees post-season play.

The actual driver at the gate is more likely the arrival of Regina Pats’ star Connor Bedard, who is a big draw around the league (even though the Pats rarely sell out).

The News cracker-jack sports department has piled through old game summaries to find another instance of a local sell-out. The former operator of the building stopped reporting concert attendance shortly after it opened, so that’s a bit murky, as well.

Quick ones

– A new top-employers survey done by another publication includes Bluearth Renewables, which has 114 employees in the province, including some in the Redcliff dispatch shop;

– Sad to note that Terry Riley appears in the obituaries this week, the former public school board trustee was an affable fellow.

A look ahead

Incoming city manager Ann Mitchel will take up her new position and be introduced at Monday’s city council meeting.

Strong Towns – maybe you’ve heard of it – will be the subject of a community open house meeting Tuesday, then for major stakeholders on Wednesday.

Controversy over the plan to build a new community resource centre in Irvine at space used for a park will be on the agenda at Cypress County’s council meeting on Tuesday.

100 years ago

Nearly 51,000 Albertans had signed a petition to bring a referendum to return beer sales to the province, but apparently no MLA was willing to present it to the legislature, the News reported in late January 1923.

The list had 15,000 more names than required by statute, but several MLAs who supported the petition felt that “fathering the issue may attach stigma.”

The bankrupt Grand Trunk Railway would be absorbed in the Canadian National Railway company, according to an order of council list in Ottawa.

A Prairie-wide wheat board for the coming season was a possibility, said Premier Greenfield. His United Farmers government had been in talks with similar parties in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, but the question was a compulsory or voluntary association.

An editorial mused on current tension in the United Farmers of Alberta government, now challenged by labour leaders’ calls to act in coal mining strikes with included mass arrests.

“The UFA is drawn from malcontents of two old parties … who took speedy advantage” to win government. But “in the nature of things, such an alliance should not continue for any lengthy period.”

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