Medicine Hat: Keeping up with the Jetsons
Cannabis!? Money that only exists on the Internet!? Helium!? It can certainly be said that three new planks in Medicine Hat’s economic development plan certainly all sound a bit out of left field.
Some might say outer space instead.
In short order, Medicine Hat has found out about plans to open the $130-million Aurora Cannabis facility — one of the world’s largest — in the north end. That’s beside a new $100 million data processing centre that will seek out cryptocurrency exchanges on the Internet and use more power than 50,000 homes each year. Whiz-bang! Holy smokers! People like talking about the verve of Harry Veiner so many years ago when he secured a tire plant and a pickle factory.
Suffice it to say, times have changed.
To be fair, there’s methanol from that era, too, and we’re finding out that public ownership of the power plant (ahem... Ted Grimm’s doing) and local price setting is a big reason recent deals were lassoed.
But the area once best known for natural gas, bricks, glass, beef and green peppers, is now pushing ahead into a seemingly brand new world.
The “new-ness” of it all wasn’t lost on Mayor Ted Clugston.
“It’s an old industry but a new product,” he said Monday of the greenhouse aspects of the highly controlled pharmaceutical sector.
“We celebrate oil and gas and rely on it, but we have always said we need to diversify. I can’t imagine industries more diverse than cannabis and cryptocurrency.”
The space-aged metaphor was expanded upon by Clugston several times in recent months at high profile speeches in which he relayed a story that’s been made famous in these parts by ATB analyst Todd Hirsch.
Essentially, NASA sent spiders into space to figure out if they’d be able to spin webs in zero gravity.
Since the leap about and dangle while doing their thing, they started out making a real mess of it.
Eventually, they figured it out, adapted and made a web.
The city, concluded Clugston, knows how to drill for gas, but in a new environment needs to adapt.
It’s hard to shoe-horn space research into a conversation, but you get the point. However, it’s not known whether the spiders caught any flies in the international space centre. We suppose not.
Aurora itself seems to be a long-haul industry, and the principles are talking about the business in the 20- to 30-year range.
Bitcoin has a bit more nebulous outlook, and the public won’t know the results of the city’s helium drilling program until a report is due at city hall in the early summer.
Local parks GM Todd Sharpe has accepted a job as the top administrator with the town of Turner Valley, near Okotoks.
In Cypress County, the minutes of that council show it’s hired former Sturgeon County CAO Peter Tarnawsky as an interim CAO until a permanent replacement for retired top administrator Doug Henderson is found.
The municipal planning commission will hear an initial move to rezone 17 properties on Allowance Avenue in the Flats back to residential zoning.
The 2011 River Flats Redevelopment Plan suggests the area should become a neighbourhood commercial hub, though two owners in the past six months have petitioned for the change back.
A local wing of the “Patriotic Potato Production League” was formed under the local horticultural society to organize cultivation of the staple on community plots, the News reported on April 20, 1918.
Federal food control board announced that cheese, lard and tea would be added to the ration list
A dispatch from England noted that a teacher’s convention had released the results of its study to describe “the Perfect Woman.” She would be a married, mother of five, sensible, business-like, religious and “her home is a place of peace.” It’s not all domestic however, as she could both ride a horse and drive a car. She has “some knowledge of the law, knows how to invest money, can use a typewriter, speaks three languages and is good at embroidery.”
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