You might have heard Slave Lake is shutting down its homeless shelter. Peace River is looking hard at its own shelter program. It’s all about cost.
In this writer’s opinion, this is just part of the provincial and federal government’s silent policy of downloading ever increasing responsibilities to local governments.
Not a big deal! If, of course, those governments would pay for it at the same time! At least, that seems to be the problem.
Our smaller local governments always seem to be saying, “We are seeing problems. And most places seem to have much the same problem for some reason. Can you help us all out with money?”
Not much to ask, is it?
Well, it would be, if it was just a local problem. But local governments don’t make a lot of the rules. And it looks like a lot of local problems are due to changes in rules upstairs.
For instance, did Vancouver always have countless homeless? Did Edmonton or Calgary, or even Cold Lake always have tent cities, or encampments? No, they did not!
But, if the experience in places like Cold Lake, and even Peace River and Slave Lake are any indication, this isn’t going away. If it isn’t going away, it might even get worse.
Why would we say that? Because if we don’t know what the root causes are, we have no idea if those “unknown” root causes are going to create an endless supply of new “problems.”
Which means of course, more need to “address those problems.” Which, as we are finding out right in our backyards, is costing each and every one of us more money.
When the problem is in Edmonton or Vancouver, we don’t think you, me, and our neighbours are paying for it. But we really are, through our taxes. Only when it shows up right in our face do we wring our hands over it.
Local politicians ask us, “Do you want your taxes to pay for this?”
Maybe we are fine with $50 or $100 per year. Maybe. So how about $200? $300? More? And keep in mind, this is just one issue. How many are happening all the time we don’t hear much about, except another “download?”
And what happens when somebody asks the politicians upstairs, “So where does all this stop?”
Nobody has any answers except keep kicking the can down to us little people.
The item above is actually the story about the frog in the pot of water. Toss a frog in a boiling pot of water and it will do its darndest to jump out as fast as it can. Put a frog in a cold pot of water on the stove and start heating it up. The frog will cook before it realizes how much trouble it is in.
That’s pretty well the situation with homeless and encampments. Crime. Drug addictions. Medical care. Even the price of gasoline and electricity. Something is getting hotter and hotter and we are doing nothing to understand what the real problem is.
The quote goes “Reading the papers, I notice all the excuses trotted out by, or on behalf of, criminals. He had no father. (Neither did I.) He grew up in poverty. (So did I.) He hadn’t much schooling. (Neither did I.) Toronto is full of people who had far worse childhoods than I did – hunger, disease, war, concentration camps, torture. They have every excuse to rape, steal and kill, but they don’t. It seems to me we will never get the crime rate down until we stop thinking of people who rape and rob and murder as social problems, and start thinking of them as rapists, robbers and murderers.” – Richard Needham, 1977
The Page is keeping track this year.
With a few “early starters” here and there, our northern leaves started turning colour the week of Sept. 19. By Sept. 27, Friday last week, there was colour in about 80 per cent or more in the trees around our parts. Plus, leaves were starting to drop. In fact, every time there is a brisk breeze, we see quite a few more leaves floating through the air.
All quite fitting for the first days of fall that, calendar wise, arrived on Sept. 21. Just another three months and days start getting longer again.
“Yes, I know what hair extensions are honey, All the top models wear them. They are very fashionable and very expensive. I realize this may sound like a radical idea but have you ever considered just letting your hair grow long instead?” – Grandma Smithers
“Has anybody ever told you that you look like a total dickhead with that fancy Bluetooth headset? You’re not the Chief Communications Officer of the Starship Enterprise – you’re a waiter in a coffee bar asking your mother if you can bring over your laundry.” – Grandpa Jonesy
You have probably heard of ePapers. This is what the newspaper industry calls its online copies of its print edition – an ePaper.
This is not the newspaper website. Instead, it is an online PDF, or image, of the actual printed newspaper.
This newspaper is testing different flavours of software to manage our own ePapers which, as it happens, our newspaper associations across Canada are also promoting the idea. The National Post and Toronto Star have had their own versions of ePapers for a few years now. The news associations want all publishers to seriously get on board with the idea of ePapers, too.
We won’t be replacing our websites at smokyriverexpress.com or at southpeacenews. com. But according to surveys, between printed copies and ePapers, almost three-quarters of adults in markets that actually have ePapers either read the print copy or the online copy.
You can preview a sample of our ePaper at members.citylive.com. It is on the right-hand sidebar. Click on the date below the image. View on your desktop or phone.
Our ePaper thing is still a bit of a ‘work in progress’ but we hope to have most wrinkles done with soon.
You might be interested to know southpeacenews.com and smokyriverexpress. com together hit almost 80,000 unique visits for the month of September. This is according to our own internal counting. Google counting says we did almost 140,000 for the same period.
Our own counting shows more than a 15 per cent increase over the same time period in 2023. Thank you very much for your support!