City Notebook: Alberta’s missing middle

By COLLIN GALLANT on April 15, 2023.

cgallant@medicinehatnews.com@CollinGallant

New polls suggest Premier Danielle Smith might have been on to something last fall when she announced an unusual course to win a majority government as the new United Conservative leader.

She would focus heavily on locking in party support in rural areas, basically leaving Edmonton to the New Democrats, and fight it out to earn a split of Calgary’s bounty of seats.

A few pundits called it crazy at the time, having clearly ignored the popular three-legged stool model for gaining power lauded by Ralph Klein.

But, a well-respected poll from Janet Brown this week states the New Democrats are currently poised to win a record number of seats in the province’s largest city, but would likely still wind up short of a majority.

Still, polls are just polls. Just ask Danielle Smith whose Wildrose Party was the darling of the polls in 2012 right up until Alison Redford returned a solid majority.

What the new poll may reveal though, is that perhaps the real battleground is actually the mid-sized cities in this province.

Lethbridge, Red Deer, Grande Prairie, St. Albert and even Medicine Hat all had some presence in the Orange Wave in 2015. Winning most of them back was icing on a pretty big cake for the UCP in 2019.

Six or seven of those seats appear to be the only road to victory for either party.

Poles reversing?

Another nugget in the Brown poll is that the UCP is bringing in locking up lower than usual numbers of seniors, which is usually bread and butter for conservative parties.

It brings to mind a local point of curiosity from the November byelection – Smith won the most votes in the community of Riverside, while NDP candidate Gwen Dirks won the most next door in the more affluent Parkview. (Shouldn’t that be the other way around?)

Quick ones

Rodeo – The Broncs and Honky Tonks go-rounds this weekend open the rodeo at the Cypress Centre, and word of more lucrative than usual tarp auctions on the chuckwagon circuit are trickling in. The four days of racing in the Hat begin July 22.

Downtown – The city centre is always a matter of two steps forward and one and a half back, but recently saw the opening of an independent new book store and a deli. Those are the kinds of small businesses driven by foot traffic that people also seem to say downtown doesn’t have enough of amidst the professional offices and social service agencies. Use them or lose them, I suppose.

Spring – Earth Day is April 23, with the city promoting a volunteer litter blitz to mark its observance. The annual blessing of the motorcycles is set to take place May 7 at the Gordon Memorial United Church in Redcliff.

Know your riding

A flood of demographic info for provincial ridings released this week shows the median annual salary in Brooks-Medicine Hat was $56,400, or about $28.20 per hour, in 2020. The same figure in Cypress-Medicine Hat was $62,800, or $31.40 per hour.

That’s of course an average, and the difference when gender is considered is as much as $20,000.

The top sector among male workers in both ridings is the construction trades, transport and related occupations, which employ about one in six male workers. The top sector for women in the combined region was sales and service occupations with a similar ratio.

A formal look at the region’s labour and skills situation is due out this month, the News is told by local economic developers.

A look ahead

After weeks of closed door discussions, city council will on Monday formally hear a proposal to underwrite a fundraising effort by the Medicine Hat Curling Club needed to complete $1.5 million in repairs to get the club-owned facility up and running after spending the last year dark following line breaks. The property tax rate will also be introduced.

100 years ago

The number of nurses paid by the province would be “greatly reduced” as the UFA government struggled to bring in a balanced budget, the News reported in April 1923.

As well in Edmonton, former Medicine Hat MLA C.R. Mitchell argued the interests of his new riding, Bassano, against Calgary’s practice of dumping untreated sewage in the Bow River.

The Utah-Idaho Sugar Co. would build a sugar refinery at Raymond in 1924, provided test crops in the coming season proved a success.

A New York financier who had “withered” for months with diabetes provided testimony for the use of the “insulin serum” recently developed by Drs. Banting and Best at the University of Toronto.

Former Medicine Hat Monarchs pitcher Harry O’Neill could start season where he ended it in 1922, with Connie Mack’s Philadelphia Athletics, the local sports page surmised.

Germany would be invited to the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris, the IOC announced.

Collin Gallant covers city politics and a variety of topics for the News

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