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Regional: So what’s in the future?
Commentary by Jeff Burgar
for South Peace News
Whether the High Prairie region can support one, two or three large scale grocery stores should make for an interesting debate.
Over at the Town of High Prairie economic development committee, the talk is already over and done. Extra Foods/No Frills is a dead issue. The committee voted to take it off their “to do” list.
According to one member, “The thinking is, if it happens it happens. There isn’t anything we can do about it.”
Now that’s quite the broad sweep of opinion for what should be go-go community boosters. It reminds us of former High Prairie John Brodrick. Brodrick gave up on the decades long fight to have hundreds of thousands of dollars in RCMP costs paid by the Province of Alberta, not by High Prairie taxpayers.
“We can’t give up. It’s too important,” said one of the councillors of the day. “It’s just one more postage stamp to keep on fighting.”
The rest of council agreed.
In time, the government also agreed, saving High Prairie taxpayers almost $1 million in today’s dollars. The change paid the way for both the Aquatic Centre and the Buchanan Recreation Centre, and basically, kept High Prairie from financial ruin.
Agreed, another grocery store is nowhere near as important as what that funding change was. Even so, what’s the deal with dropping it? High Prairie citizens are treated over and over again with stories of “hard work”. Somewhere in that pile of “hard work” there must be details of retail leakage studies. Somewhere in the pile of “hard work” there must be details of the local economy to justify business decisions like opening a new store, or expanding existing ones.
So, where is the information? Or, like worrying a blister that just won’t heal, are High Prairie citizens back scratching their butts and wondering what the heck the future holds for their fine community?
We can give the members of the economic development pursuit committee the benefit of the doubt. Behind some closed doors, it is said there are secret doings sucking up all the available manpower. With such a paucity of labour to go around since we are so busy on secret projects, dumping Extra Foods was the thing to do.
May we ask, have we heard this story before?
It’s interesting Loblaw spent $900,000 on land beside the RCMP office in High Prairie for the new Extra Foods store. Here’s a no-brainer. Hire the brilliant salesperson who managed to convince Loblaw, Canada’s biggest grocery retailer, High Prairie is a good place to do business.
That would be Nick Shybunia.
Shybunia, based on this success alone, has moved this project ahead more than any of the folks on council, in the town office, or any sitting on our pursuit committee.
That should tell us all something, if we choose to listen.
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