One of my current rants: There's been a major water main break in Calgary, and a significant portion of the city has been affected. Everyone there (Calgary is a city of approximately 1.5 million people) has been put on water restrictions - no laundry, no lawn watering, use less water for showers, cooking, and toilet flushing...
So what's my issue? I don't live in Calgary and this doesn't affect me at all. The issue is that in spite of so many people having to worry about enough water for the basics, the city council there decided to go ahead with the Calgary Stampede.
This is a situation that's going to take over a month to fix, and the Stampede starts during the first week of July. It runs for 10 days, and includes a major rodeo and midway. Hotels get full up there and in surrounding towns and cities. A LOT of people are going to be there, above those who normally live there.
This all means major water usage. You can't short the rodeo animals and the petting zoo animals on water. Tourists aren't going to appreciate being told to take ultra-short showers and not to expect laundry services. The race tracks where the chuckwagon races and barrel races happen need to be wetted down from time to time because of all the dust that gets churned up.
And on and on and on. There's not enough water for normal usage for the regular residents. Yet they claim that putting on a major 10-day rodeo and midway won't be any problem at all.
That's insane. Of course it's going to be a problem. It's already a problem, and that's with cool weather (there was a frost advisory a couple of days ago). By mid-July, temperatures can be in the high 30s and more. People and animals will have to stay hydrated. Cooling stations have to be open.
And yet the politicians think it's a good idea to waste limited water on a rodeo.
Politically, it's a mess. The premier is being two-faced about it. She has a pathological hatred for the mayors of both Edmonton and Calgary, and pushed through legislation that allows her to remove any elected municipal politician that she thinks isn't acting in "the public interest" (no matter that they were elected by the voters in the municipality, which is a different level of government). "The public interest" really means "the UCP's interest."
The Stampede is one of the major political events of the year, as well. So many of our provincial representatives are going to be there, taking part in pancake breakfast events, showing off their brand-new fake cowboy costumes in a failed attempt to look like a "typical Westerner", and spinning their party lines to the public who comes for free pancakes that were flipped by their MLAs.
That's the real reason the Stampede is going ahead despite the water shortage. The provincial politicians want their pancake and barbecue photo-ops. The mayor of Calgary is looking at the tourist dollars that come into the city during those 10 days, because the province has been offloading a lot of things onto the municipalities and they cost $$$$$$$$.
For those of us who don't live or work in Calgary, we're mostly okay for water (there's drought in the southern region of the province so they're not okay). But everyone but the premier and her loyal sycophants is just so utterly disgusted.
And of course they're blaming the mayor of Calgary (who happens to be a non-white woman, so she's a target), as though she personally laid the pipes decades ago, and even Justin Trudeau, because of course he hates Alberta and breaking Calgary's water mains is the sort of thing he'd do to "control" Alberta.
I'm living in a loony bin here.
