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U11, U13, U15 and U18 teams are featured this week.

U9, U7 and U5 will be in the spotlight next week

Local stories, news, obituaries, jobs, notices and events in Pincher Creek and Crowsnest Pass in the Jan. 15 issue of Shootin’ the Breeze.

The post News and events: Pincher Creek & Crowsnest Pass | Jan. 15, 2025 appeared first on Shootin' the Breeze.

If you’re a homeowner, chances are you recently got your property assessment notice. Some houses went up in value, while others decreased. Mrinali Anchan has more on the neighbourhoods that saw the most and least change — and what that means for your taxes.

Kingsley Ogieva was recognized by the Highway Angel program for his efforts to help a man trapped in a tractor-trailer that rolled on a busy southern Alberta highway.

The Alberta Energy Regulator is holding the hearings to review coal exploration permits submitted by Northback Holdings, the company behind a proposed coking coal mine in the M.D. of Ranchland, just north of Crowsnest Pass.

The lawyer for a man accused of drugging and raping seven women wants a Calgary judge to call off the trial due to his client’s inability to speak following a stroke last spring.

Support staff have walked off the job at Edmonton and Sturgeon public schools. Students who rely on support from educational assistants are feeling the disruption. Nicki Pasieka is a parent of a kindergarten student with Type 1 diabetes.

Cohos’s family confirmed he passed away on Jan. 9 while on a cruise from New Zealand to Australia. 

The union representing mechanics and labourers at Canadian Pacific Kansas City Ltd. says 99 per cent of its members have voted in favour of strike action.

In December 2012, Conservative citizenship and immigration minister Jason Kenney, who spent the previous several years ranting and raving about “bogus refugees” and “false [asylum] claimants” who were cheating the system, announced plans to fast-track asylum claims from countries he deemed “safe.”

Starting that month, refugee claimants from 27 countries classified as designated safe countries of origin—all European Union states and the U.S.—would have one opportunity to make their case for asylum at the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB). If they were denied, they would no longer have the right to appeal their case at the board and would be swiftly deported.

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Kenney shelled out $3,000 to purchase six billboards in Miskolc, Hungary, where a large Romani population was becoming increasingly targeted by far-right forces, warning residents that if they tried to apply for Canadian asylum and didn’t have all their papers in order, they “will be processed faster and removed faster.”

Soon after, Kenney added an additional eight countries to the list, including Mexico, where a twice-rejected asylum seeker who was deported from Canada was kidnapped and killed by a drug cartel in 2009.

In 2019, three-quarters of the way through Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s first term, a Federal Court justice ruled that treating asylum seekers differently based on assumptions about the country they’re from is unconstitutional, a ruling which Trudeau didn’t challenge.

But it turns out that this discriminatory refugee regime remains informally intact, even as increasing numbers of asylum seekers are accepted into Canada.

Aidan Simardone, a Toronto-based immigration lawyer and writer, told the Orchard that the way political leaders talk about refugees “shapes perceptions,” producing long-lasting “unconscious biases” in institutions of power.

“Even when the whole designated country of origin framework went away, you have all these cases of Romani people being denied refugee protection, people from Mexico being denied refugee protection and that legacy therefore continues on,” Simardone said in an interview.

In a Jan. 11 CBC investigation, journalists Tara Carman and Owen Leitch conclude that there exists “two systems for deciding asylum claims: one that produces mostly positive decisions for people from countries Canada has deemed to be sources of legitimate refugees, and another for everyone else.”

According to IRB figures the reporters cite, the number of successful Canadian asylum claims increased from 14,000 in 2018 to 37,000 in 2023.

From January 2018 through September 2024, the recognition rate, which calculates the percentage of accepted claims by excluding those that were withdrawn, abandoned or deferred, increased from 64% to 82%.

Carman and Leitch note the disparity in recognition rates of asylum seekers from various countries between January 2018 and September 2024.

Claimants from Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey, representing a combined 35,000 asylum seekers, were accepted at a rate of 95%. Meanwhile, around half of asylum seekers from Mexico, Haiti, Nigeria and India, representing a combined 65,000 claimants, were accepted.

The CBC reporters contend this is a result of an increasing number of cases being handled without a hearing, based solely on the documents claimants submit, which is known as a paper review.

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“Refugee claims cannot be rejected without a hearing, so paper reviews have only two possible outcomes: a positive decision, or a decision to send a case to a hearing,” write Carman and Leitch.

With a growing backlog of asylum claims—250,000 in September 2024 compared to 43,000 at the end of 2017—the IRB has opted to increase the number of paper reviews as a quick-fix for claimants from countries with historically high recognition rates.

While the CBC article contains valuable information, it’s framed around the assumption that Canada accepts too many refugees and that “the system is vulnerable to abuse”—the precise type of claims Kenney made vociferously when he was immigration and citizenship minister.

Simardone called this assumption “complete bullshit,” noting that the CBC article contains no data on fraudulent claims—”people literally making things up” to claim asylum—which from his experience “hardly ever happens.”

He said there’s far greater risk from IRB officials being “hyper-vigilant” and rejecting claims based on the “slightest discrepancy” in the claimant’s account.

“Every now and then there's cases of people who make false claims of having cancer and start a GoFundMe. Should we start shutting down GoFundMe and start turning people away from the hospital because there are some false claims? No, that'd be ridiculous,” said Simardone.

The CBC piece quotes Vancouver-based immigration and refugee lawyer Mojdeh Shahriari, who used to sit on the IRB, in which she evokes “common knowledge” that the asylum process “has been and is increasingly being abused.”

Shahriari raises the spectre of paper review documents being fabricated to argue that more IRB cases need to go to hearings, although it’s unclear from the story whether she’s aware of any incidents where that’s actually occurred.

“If there is no hearing, there is no scrutiny of the person's credibility. The door for abuse is always open,” Shahriari said.

But Toronto-based refugee lawyer Debbie Rachlis told the Orchard that an IRB hearing “very often ends up testing how good people are at being witnesses.”

“Most people are not great, but I will tell you that the people who are good tend to be literate and educated,” she said in an interview.

Rachlis noted that when politicians and media discuss potential abuses to the asylum seeking system, there’s often confusion about the definition of refugee, as established in the 1951 Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, to which Canada is a signatory.

Under the convention, a refugee is someone who has a “well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.”

This definition excludes people who are fleeing horrific circumstances that are outside their control, including poverty and war, Rachlis added.

Failing to meet the convention’s narrow definition of a refugee, she emphasized, doesn’t make the claimant a “bad actor.”

“Some people don't meet the definition, but still have good reason to be afraid,” Rachlis said.

Part of the problem has to do with the biases of individual IRB adjudicators, who don’t require any formal legal training. There’s “nothing scientific” about their rulings, Rachlis said.

Research from Sean Rehaag, who runs the Refugee Law Lab at York University’s Osgoode Hall Law School, shows recognition rates from 2013 to 2023 fluctuated wildly by adjudicator, ranging from 2.8% to 100%.

In 2017, referring to an earlier version of these findings, Rehaag told the CBC that the individualized disparity in recognition rates demonstrate the need to “appoint people who have a solid understanding of refugee law and who are not predisposed to denying claims.”

Lubomyr Luciuk, a Royal Military College political geographer who denies Ukrainian nationalists’ participation in the Holocaust, served as an IRB adjudicator from 1996 to 1998, and again from a brief period in 2018.

During his initial tenure, he earned the nickname Dr. No for turning down 90% of refugee claimants.

“Be a liar. That’s the first lesson most claimants who come before the Immigration and Refugee Board learn,” Luciuk wrote in a September 2001 op-ed that was published in the Ottawa Citizen, Vancouver Sun, Calgary Herald and Kingston Whig-Standard, which argued that Canada’s asylum system has it “a haven for … assorted terrorists, drug peddlers and war criminals.”

A January 2018 Global News investigation revealed repeated instances of IRB judges engaging in misconduct, including a 2010 incident in which an adjudicator demanded to see nude photos of a Ukrainian sex trafficking victim before denying her asylum claim.

When Simardone hears talk of too many refugees coming into Canada with insufficient scrutiny, he can’t help but think of the nearly 300,000 Ukrainian refugees who’ve made Canada home over the past few years through the Canada–Ukraine Authorization for Emergency Travel (CUAET)—more than triple the number of refugees approved by the IRB from January 2022 through September 2024.

Beginning in March 2022, the CUAET opened Canada’s doors to an unlimited number of Ukrainians fleeing Russia’s invasion of their country, providing them with free settlement services.

“I wish that was the case for everyone,” said Simardone.

A city councillor is suggesting the City of Calgary do an external review of how its operations and council decisions are being impacted by false information. Coun. Courtney Walcott said he plans to bring forward a motion to council, calling for its support for a review.

Edmonton utilities company Epcor has dropped part of a fee charged to customers who opt out of the installation of new water meter reading devices. Some customers and advocates for Palestinians had expressed concern over the device's ties to an Israeli company criticized for water extraction and exploitation in the West Bank and Gaza.

The Alberta government's work to lure data centres to the province and spur artificial intelligence could be a costly effort that exceeds the capacity of our electrical grid and highlight how expensive our electricity is, says the operator of several independent data centres in Edmonton.

"We have something like five or 10% of the expected data centre capacity we'll need for the next five or 10 years," Dale Corse, the CEO of Wolfpaw Data Centres, told Taproot about the Edmonton region. "Could we handle an AI boom? No, absolutely not."

Data centres routinely make news in Edmonton nowadays, yet people rarely get to understand what they are, how they work, and what their business model is. Taproot set out to discover these details from Corse at Wolfpaw, which is one of at least six operators of commercial data centres in Edmonton. Wolfpaw has been in operation since 1998, and has spaces at Rice Howard Place and within two Rogers facilities in town.

The provincial government's goal is to build the data centre capacity that an AI boom would need in Alberta. Its Artificial Intelligence Data Centres Strategy, rolled out in December, sets to develop Alberta's electrical capacity, solve cooling challenges for data centres, and ultimately drive economic growth by seeing companies invest to build centres and AI to use them. The strategy lists objectives for each of these goals, and a map of actions that includes modernizing regulations and collaborating with municipalities. When announced, Minister of Technology and Innovation Nate Glubish said he wants to see $100 billion invested in data centre infrastructure in Alberta over the next five years.

What's a data centre?

"A data centre is a place where you would rent space — either physical space or possibly computer space — to put your IT stuff so that it stays online all the time," Corse said.

Data centres house the computers needed to power the internet, the applications and storage that companies rely on, and increasingly, the computing power needed to create services that use AI.

Corse said the two key functions of a data centre are to keep the electricity on, even during a power outage, and to keep the computers cool. "A data centre would be expected to be able to deal with all of those problems for you so that as a company, you can just concentrate on your business and don't have to also be an IT company on top of trying to do your day to day," he said.

Wolfpaw's facility at Rice Howard Place consumes 5,000 square feet and can draw up to 400 kilowatts of electricity at a time. The company has redundancies, including generators, for its power and cooling to ensure its operations never go down, Corse said. Right now, the centre draws around 200 kilowatts for its clients. By contrast, Corse estimated the average household draws a maximum of 10 kilowatts at any given time.

How does the business work?

A data centre's biggest expense is electricity, Corse said. Real estate is "one of the smaller numbers on the balance sheet," he added. The input cost of electricity is the greatest hurdle, he said, and even building the infrastructure to supply it is pricey.

It costs between $8 million and $10 million to build one megawatt, or 1,000 kilowatts, of data centre power, Corse said. "Some of these AI guys, (they) come to us and they want three megawatts of power. OK, well, that's $30 million worth of equipment just to run it, and then you have the input cost (from electricity) on top of it. So it is a great business, so long as somebody can afford to pay for that. Is it a great business for the small guy? Maybe not."

Who uses data centres?

Wolfpaw employs five people, plus contractors, to serve roughly 100 clients. Corse said naming customers would violate their privacy, but did share that some are based in the United States and that "the vast majority" of non-TELUS-based internet service providers from north and east of Edmonton in Alberta run through his data centres before reaching consumers. Many of Wolfpaw's customers are local, he said, and there are reasons why a client might prefer a data centre to be close by.

"The closer you are to your data, the faster you're going to get it," Corse said. "If you were doing real-time gaming, for example, where the person hits a button on their controller and then something happens at the data centre ... that distance will matter."

Does Alberta have a data-centre advantage?

The province has touted Alberta's colder climate, that it's the only Canadian province with a fully deregulated electricity market, and that it has curbed governmental red tape as the advantages that make it ideal for investors hoping to build data centres.

Corse said Alberta's climate is a benefit, as cooling is the second-greatest challenge after electricity. "Our climate is already cold, so you can use that to your advantage," he said. "It's better than putting (a data centre) into the southern U.S., where it's already hot and then you (need to) cool it off on top of that. It's sort of a natural fit for us here."

But Corse said Alberta's price of electricity and its availability from the grid are less advantageous. Speaking to CBC, he said Edmonton's electricity was the most expensive in Canada in 2023. Energy Hub, which tracks energy in Canada, shows Alberta had the highest average price for electricity among the provinces in 2023, at $0.258 per kilowatt hour. Places where electricity was more expensive in 2023 were the Northwest Territories ($0.41 per kWh) and Nunavut ($0.354 per kWh).

The grid has also been unable to cope with demand, leading to several brownouts.

The province, however, has said new data centre operators will be encouraged to build their own power supply rather than pull power from the grid. During his CBC Edmonton AM interview, Corse said that's like asking truck companies to build highways. He also said the price of electricity needs to be cheaper.

"I don't know how many people are going to have the expertise or the ability to do something like that," he added to Taproot about building power facilities. "If you can't make your own power, then you've got to buy it from the grid. And our power here in Alberta is very expensive compared to the rest of the country, so I think that is something the government, if they're serious about this, has got to work on."

Glubish has proposed natural gas and even geothermal energy be used as power sources for data centres. One example he has highlighted is Wonder Valley Data Centre, an off-grid project using natural gas and geothermal power that's being built by O'Leary Ventures near Grande Prairie. Both Glubish and Premier Danielle Smith provided quotes for the project's press release.

What's happening next for data centres?

O'Leary Ventures is a business started by Kevin O'Leary of Dragons' Den fame. Its plan, to build the world's largest data-centre industrial park, was announced in December. The announcement also said the development will yield more than $70 billion in investment during its operations, which are planned to roll out in phases. The province's major projects webpage lists the cost of Phase 1 of the project at $2.8 billion.

Wonder Valley isn't the only data centre added to the major projects list in December. Beacon, a company with offices in Dublin, Ireland, and Calgary, has proposed five data centres in the province, including ones in Leduc County, Parkland County, and Strathcona County. Each would have 400 megawatts of power available. Only the one located outside High River has been ascribed a cost: $4 billion. The Western Wheel reported that the centre "would include five two-storey buildings on a more than 260-acre parcel and create 300 jobs when operational."

The major projects site notes the facility will contain 400 MW of "onsite power generation capacity," along with two five story buildings.

Self-powered data centres are making headlines. California's Edge Cloud Link opened a modular, hydrogen-powered data centre in May, and now plans to open another hydrogen-fuelled facility this summer outside Houston, Texas. Just the first phase of the project is valued at US$450 million, and the data centre should eventually offer one gigawatt (1,000 megawatts) of power.

Increasing wildfire prevention in the Bow Valley has long been a priority for Canmore and nearby communities, though a lack of funding has delayed many preventative measures in the past.

Calgary police struggled to control the violence and destruction carried out by two groups of Eritrean Calgarians, a judge heard Monday, as one detective testified it took nearly 200 officers as well as tear gas grenades and nearly 2,000 rounds of pepper balls to separate the clashing sides. 

Monday's court decision comes after a man with opioid use disorder filed a lawsuit arguing that closing the OPS is a violation of his Charter rights, as well as the rights of other site users who will be left at an increased risk of a fatal overdose.

Noah Madrano, 43, pleaded guilty to two of six federal U.S. charges he faced for sexually abusing a 13-year-old Edmonton girl he took across the border in 2022.

Calgarians will have a new direct-flight destination in Mexico starting this spring.

Before entering politics, Notley was a labour lawyer. That included a stint with the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees, where she handled workers' compensation cases.

Matt Noble, executive director of the "Put Food Banks Out Of Business" campaign, says the existence of food banks creates the perception that food insecurity in the country is being taken care of, when in reality, things are getting worse.

First Nations leaders are urging Canada to reconsider its decision not to renew national negotiations on a $47.8-billion proposal to reform the on-reserve child welfare system long term, after chiefs rejected the offer last fall.

Hundreds more cases of sexual assault and sexual exploitation have gone to trial in Alberta since 2017, data shows. The #MeToo movement has helped take away the stigma faced by survivors, while intentional change, teamwork and fewer preliminary hearings have helped push cases to court.

The final round of voting for Edmonton's City Bird is now open. The boreal chickadee, blue jay, and black-billed magpie are the three species flying for your vote to be Edmonton's avian representative.

Thousands of Edmontonians voted in the first round to narrow the choices down to these three. Nick Carter, the nature kids coordinator with Nature Alberta and a council member of Bird Friendly Edmonton, said species had to be easily recognizable and live in Edmonton year-round to be considered for the vote.

The boreal chickadee has that call we all recognize — chicka-dee-dee-dee-dee — (which, by the way, has been described as "one of the most sophisticated and exacting systems of communication of any land animal"). But Carter said it sounds like a congested version of the call of its relative, the black-capped chickadee. "A lot of people wondered why we didn't have the black-capped chickadee (as a contestant), which is pretty well ubiquitous in the city, and that's because Calgary already took it," Carter said. "They scooped it out from under us, so we can't go with that one, because we want to be unique."

However, while the black-capped chickadee is found all across the country, the boreal chickadee is a northern species. Edmonton is Canada's northernmost major city, so the boreal is a fitting choice, Carter said.

Blue jays made it to the top three because they're popular, especially among older Edmontonians, Carter said. "We don't have another bird that common that's like, vividly blue, and they're intelligent, they're social. They do have some crow habits like being a bit loud and raucous and doing things like eating other small birds, but people tend to kind of look past that with blue jays nowadays," Carter said.

Carter mentioned that blue jays — associated with a certain Ontario city's baseball team — have become more common in Edmonton in recent years. Perhaps the Alberta is Calling campaign worked on more than just skilled workers.

The black-billed magpie, however, is Carter's pick, mainly because it's truly a Western bird, he said. The chickadee and blue jay can be found across most of Canada, but Edmonton is at the heart of the magpie's range.

"I think it's a pretty Edmonton kind of bird. It's something that we would want to be proud of, and it embodies a lot of the good and, you know, the less desirable about the city," Carter said. "It's scrappy, but it's intelligent, it's social, it's complex, it might not look all that much to us on the surface. But people from other parts of the world, or even other parts of Canada, see magpies and they're like, 'Oh my God, this is the most beautiful bird ever.'"

Carter encourages Edmontonians to vote early because he wants to beat the voter turnout for Calgary's ornithological election, which took place in 2022 and selected the black-capped chickadee. "It's going to be a bit of a tall order because we have a smaller population, but it'll be great for local pride if we can do that." Voting closes on March 31. When a victor is crowned, not much will change, Carter admits. But he hopes municipal officials take note of the vote and make one of the birds, whether magpie, chickadee, or blue jay, Edmonton's official fowl.

Calgary's fire chief says a heightened risk of cancer is just part of the job, but the risks can be reduced.

A massive, mixed-use development is planned at the former site of a Calgary movie theatre, but this production is something the burgeoning southwest community has never seen before and it's a blockbuster.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith visited Mar-a-Lago, the Florida home of U.S. president-elect Donald Trump, on Saturday.

The average cost of renting an apartment in rural Alberta increased again last year, according to the results of a provincial survey.

Sunday marks the 100th anniversary of Peter Anthony Prince's death, a business magnate who a local historian calls the "Citizen Kane of Calgary."

Provincial data shows more than 3,000 recorded cases of the flu across the province during the 2024-2025 flu season.

Like the laundry that never goes away, research on the gender gap has shown us the same pattern over and over: women still take on more of the domestic tasks than men. Now, new research out of the University of Alberta helps shed light on why closing the gap is such a challenge.

According to Maureen Palmer, an author and journalist, a person's relationship with alcohol is far more nuanced than a simple question of whether they're an alcoholic or not.

Wanting to be a Karen is a loaded concept. As an anxious brown woman who avoids confrontation, being a Karen for Zahra Khozema means standing up for herself.

The councillor posted to social media on Friday evening saying he won't run for a second term in office, after he was first elected to represent Ward 12 in 2021.

TikTok, the immensely popular short-form video app, is on the verge of getting banned in the U.S., calling its future viability into question.

In April 2024, President Joe Biden signed a bill into law, passed with bipartisan support in Congress, forcing the the Chinese company that owns the app, ByteDance, to sell it by Jan. 19.

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The Calgary Flames have been overachieving in the standings, but as they hit the halfway mark of the 2024-25 season, doubts persist over how long they can keep the momentum going. 

Mark Datoc was 13 when his mom left to work in Canada. He was upset and jealous of his peers who still had mothers around them every day, but her sacrifice was worth it in the end, he writes. Today, his family is together in Calgary and he has a chance for a bright future.

Staffing smaller ERs in Canada is a struggle for many provinces. That's why some health authorities are relying on a doctor working virtually and the nurses on the ground to keep the doors open.

Whoever emerges from the upcoming Liberal leadership race will face a formidable Conservative challenger with a populist message and deep connections to Alberta. And this battle for the nation’s top political post has a distinctly Western Canadian flavour, with three major figures tied to the region.

Calgary’s property values increased significantly last year, with residential properties seeing the biggest gains, according to the city’s property assessment department.

Notice from the MD of Pincher Creek:

Due to increasingly dangerous wind conditions, the Crowsnest / Pincher Creek Landfill is closed for the remainder of the day, Friday, Jan. 10, 2025.

The Eco Centre will remain open.

At 2 p.m., Environment Canada advised of west wind at 55 km/h with gusts to 65 at the Pincher Creek Airport. There is also a 60 per cent chance of flurries this evening.

The post Crowsnest / Pincher Creek Landfill Closed appeared first on Shootin' the Breeze.

A Calgary man accused of killing a nine-year-old girl in a Boxing Day crash does not need a mental health assessment, a judge heard Friday. 

Alberta's Opposition NDP is calling on the provincial government to act as thousands of school support workers prepare to walk off the job in Edmonton and some nearby communities.

Edmonton Oilers forward Evander Kane was expected to need four to eight weeks of recovery time after undergoing successful knee surgery, the NHL team said Friday.

Alberta’s unemployment rate dipped to 6.7 per cent in December, dropping by 1.2 percentage points from a month prior, according to a Statistics Canada jobs report that was released on Friday.

Two men who became the faces of a COVID-19 protest blockade at a key border crossing between Alberta and the United States nearly three years ago will learn their fates Friday.

Asking rates for apartment rentals in Calgary went down in January, marking the biggest decline across major markets in Canada, according to the latest report from rentals.ca.

Edmonton police and city crews removed nearly 9,500 homeless encampments in 2024 — up more than 40 per cent from the 6,700 they took down the year before, city data shows. 

In 2024, Taproot reported on several stories that evolved after we published them. In this, our final retrospective of 2024, we caught up with two specific stories that will continue to offer new details in 2025.

Riverboat's business partners to part in 2025

The original story: In 2024, Taproot was the first to report that two serial entrepreneurs, Rob Davy and Eric Warnke, had purchased the Edmonton Riverboat. The two met as teenagers when they were among the first employees at Nexopia, Canada's first social network. The new owners said they thought the riverboat had only scratched the surface of its potential and that they wanted to offer an elevated experience.

Then what? "It blew our expectations out of the water — no pun intended," Warnke told Taproot in an online interview from the boat in late December. Warnke said customers enjoyed duelling piano performances the most. For about 10% of sailings, the river's water levels were too low for the boat to complete its full course, so those customers were given credits to return in 2025 for a full experience. Davy left the business at the end of the 2024 season. "He owns, like three other businesses, so it wasn't as simple as tacking on a fourth one as we thought it would be, and then ultimately, we're just better friends than partners," Warnke said. "It's an amicable thing. We're still friends."

What's next? The boat was moored at the end of September, but it's still being used for parties through the winter, including a New Year's Eve bash. Warnke said he hopes to start the 2025 sailing season on Mother's Day. He's planning for a special event to celebrate the boat's 30th anniversary in May, and to run sailings daily in 2025 instead of from Thursday to Sunday. -Stephanie Swensrude

Edmonton Edge Fund continues to reverberate in 2025

The original story: In May, the City of Edmonton granted $4.7 million to 17 organizations through Phase 1 of the Edmonton Edge Fund. The fund is intended to drive economic and social benefits. There were two categories of funding: Scale & Grow, which offered from $250,000 to $1 million to companies that could prove a matching 50% investment, and the Start Stream for earlier-stage companies, which offered up to $100,000. Scale & Grow recipients included DiveThru, Future Fields, and Kind Ice Cream Select Start Stream recipients included OligomicsTx (which won a Startup TNT summit earlier in the year), Swift Charge, UpRow, and ZerOne.

Then what? In October, ZerOne held a grand opening for its Hockeyology and Atheleticare facility after telling Taproot that it uses tech and multidisciplinary medicine to support athletes. Kind Ice Cream also spoke to Taproot to detail its plans for modular ice cream shops, acquiring a larger production facility, and offering business-to-business sales. Elsewhere, UpRow won a pitch competition at Inventures by Alberta Innovates in May. In November, Future Fields opened its Instar 1.0 biomanufacturing facility.

What's next? The city's reference to the Edge Fund in May as Phase 1 suggested that a Phase 2 was at least possible. Nik George from the City of Edmonton told Taproot in an email that the city is "actively exploring options for the future of the Edge Fund," but the fund does not "have additional funding to support new projects" yet. Companies that received Edge funding have shared further updates with Taproot. Kind Ice Cream said in an email that its first modular location, dubbed "Bestie," will open this summer at a location "that is currently underserved when it comes to ice cream and dessert options." Swift Charge said in an email that its fast electric vehicle charger is done with testing and should be operational in south Edmonton and Lloydminster by the end of January. DiveThru, meanwhile, said in an email that it will open its newest location in "early 2025." -Colin Gallant

Amid a charged political debate around immigration in both Canada and the United States, one Calgary organization supporting newcomers is seeing a rise in anti-immigrant hate — both online and in person.

Although people haven’t been able to visit the Glenbow Museum for over three years, it doesn’t mean it hasn’t been busy inside. The space has been undergoing a significant transformation during renovations.