Index Page for Issues and Features pertaining to
Bruderheim
Ideas on what to do to attract more people
that wish to live in Bruderheim
By Walter Schneider
Index
Update 2005 08 03:
The water at that intersection can now run off through the ditch
there. The ditch got graded to get rid of the nasty hump that
blocked the water from running off properly. (Photo
and full story)
Bruderheim is a typical prairie town. Like any
other prairie town it has a problem with crystal meth.
Unofficial sources state that there are nine crack houses in
Bruderheim. A while ago we had a mother and one of her sons visit
us. They told us that the son had just successfully finished a
rehabilitation program to cure his crystal-meth addiction. He
became addicted when he did nothing more than smoke a little pot.
The dealer who had provided him with the pot had mixed in crystal
meth to make sure his customer would be a steady one and return
often.
The young man then in short order proceeded from buying and
smoking pot to buying and smoking crystal meth until he no longer
functioned well enough to hold a job. He is cured, doing fine now
and once again holds a steady, full-time job.
The faces of
crystal meth (4.5 MB wmv file) are not the faces of Bruderheim
residents, but they are typical of some known in Bruderheim. If you
think that you need help, check out
Crystal Meth Anonymous.
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Turning Liabilities into Assets
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The Rail Motel
-
The Genier
House
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48th-Ave
Park
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Weed identification and control
That link will take you out of this website, but it will lead you to a
very good source of information for identifying weeds in lawns, for
controlling them and on how to create a healthy lawn that will prevent
weeds from becoming established. The website contains a very good index
to individual web pages with descriptions and excellent photos of many
weeds that are common in our area. The pages for each variety of weed
also contain recommendations as to what to do to avoid having the weed
establish itself and on what to do to get rid of the weed if it should
be present.
-
The
proposed sulphur storage facility envisioned to be constructed
between Bruderheim and Lamont is a bad idea.
Introduction
Although we have had the same Bruderheim mailing address and phone number
since the year 1973, it took us until the year 2004 before we were able to
move from our farm to the town of Bruderheim, Alberta, 8.5 miles from the
location of our farm. We enjoy our new house (actually an older one that
needs a few repairs and some landscaping) and life in Bruderheim. Since the
time we moved here we met quite a few people and got to know better a lot
whom we previously more or less knew only by sight.
There are many people in Bruderheim that take a very active interest in
their community; and the beauty of many gardens and flowers in the summer is
something to behold.
Earlier in 2004, just before we moved into Town, a consulting firm had
been hired by the Town of Bruderheim. The firm asked for and collected
input on what could be done to make Bruderheim a vibrant and growing
community. After all, cities like Edmonton, Calgary or even Fort
Saskatchewan once were little towns no bigger than Bruderheim is right now.
Bruderheim was once a bit bigger, if not in size but in population.
Families had more children than they have now, and at that time Bruderheim
even had a junior high school.
A few years ago the junior high school got closed due to declining
enrolment. Of course, a somewhat contributing factor is the reality of an
ageing population in Bruderheim itself and in the rural community
surrounding Bruderheim. Few farm families now have children of school age.
The average number of children per family has been declining over the years
in Bruderheim, too. That average number of children per family has long ago
dropped far below the point where a community can maintain its population,
even if all of them would stay in town after they grow up. Most of the
children raised here move away.
The average age of Canadian farmers stands at about 67 years. Few, if
any, of the roughly 247,000 annual immigrants (short by about 50,000 from
the federal government's annual target of one percent of Canada's
residential population) from underdeveloped nations to Canada settle in
rural areas, and why should they? The Canadian governments are hell-bent
for leather to eradicate farming as a viable industry. It appears that
their primary objective, the implementation of the program for the
eradication of the human race whose presence many see as a malignant
infestation on the face of Gaia has a good start by giving Canada's
ruralities back to the coyotes.
In view of those long-term developments it is not too surprising that
early in 2005 there was a very serious threat that the Town of Bruderheim
would lose its public school. Kindergarten to Grade VI are being taught in
that school. The authorities alleged that there has been a declining
enrolment of students, even though there is a fairly large and greatly
increased enrolment of students in kindergarten, with those students of
course being prospective students for the Bruderheim Public School, Grades I
to VI.
Moreover, whether it was done out of ignorance or with malice, the report
produced by the Elk Island district school administration contained a number
of seriously misleading flaws. One of those was that the annual decreases
in student enrolment shown in the report were indicated by the actual
numbers of the reductions, but those numbers had percent signs appended to
them, which made those numbers look far worse than they truly were. Others
were false and misleading figures that misrepresented where Bruderheim is
located, how many miles students from Bruderheim would have to be bused to
nearby schools, and the costs for the busing of students that was based on
those factors.
A truly outrageous distortion comprised an estimate of school operating
costs and the alleged savings that could be had if the school were to be
closed. One of the factors that the report's recommendation was based on,
for example, showed escalating floor space used per student over the years.
Yet, the largest influence for that is the fact that the portable classrooms
that had been added to the school to accommodate its relatively large number
of students a few years ago, when it still taught junior high school
classes, had not been removed for use elsewhere, and that the Elk Island
school district administration's report had not allowed for moving those
portable buildings elsewhere for re-use.
The report is so misleading that even a junior lawyer would have no
problem with making a case for the Elk Island School Board having been
involved in a serious case of dereliction of duties in relation to
exercising due diligence, and I said so at the public meeting of over 400
citizens of Bruderheim that showed up to meet with the Elk Island School
Board.
The closure of the public school in a small town is generally a major
last step and milestone to that town's ultimate decline and eventual demise
into being a ghost town. Bruderheim already lost many of its businesses and
reached the point where it is difficult to establish viable new ones.
Once there were three blacksmith shops, a whole row of grain elevators, a
cheese factory that was famous for producing some of the best cheddar cheese
in Canada (it won the gold medal at the CNE in Toronto, out of more than 90
entries), a number of restaurants, coffee shops and stores, a feed mill and
even
a real old-fashioned windmill (that is now on display in Heritage Park
in Calgary).
The major asset of Bruderheim now is
 no
longer that it is a service center for agriculture, but that it is in an
ideal location for families with workers in the not-so-distant oil
refineries in Fort Saskatchewan, in the existing chemical and assembly
plants, and in the refineries and up-graders yet to be built in short order
in the counties of Strathcona and Lamont. Many people in Bruderheim work in
Fort McMurray at the various tar-sands projects and related jobs. Moreover,
a number of refinery projects and crude-oil up-grader expansion projects
have been announced and will provide employment for many thousands of
workers for years to come, close by.
For anyone having to commute daily to such jobs, commuting to them from
Bruderheim is a breeze: A few miles of highway travel, no traffic lights,
and a few minutes later, in no more than about a quarter hour, one is either
home or on the job.
A good number of people showed great interest in keeping the Bruderheim
Public School open, made a good case for keeping it open, and convinced the
Elk Island District School Board to decide in its hearing on March 17, 2005
to do just that.
However, for that to succeed and to address the concerns expressed at the
community consultations last year as to how to attract more families —
families of seniors and families with children or planning to have children
— to come to Bruderheim and settle here, a little extra is required.
Maybe that is what Bruderheim is doing, but one has to wonder.
Next page: Garbage
dumps in town.
____________________
Posted May 21, 2005
Updates:
2005 06 12 (added more entries to index)
2005 06 24 (added link to article on dog-bylaw enforcement)
2005 07 03 (Added link to pages with
Canada-Day-2005 photos)
2005 08 03 (added link to progress report on the
elimination of the flooding problem at 51st ST and 52nd Ave)
2006 01 30 (added index section for Bruderheim Seniors)
2006 07 03 (added link to photos of Canada Day
2006 in Bruderheim)
2006 10 28 (reformated) | 
