As hard as it is to believe, 2019 is in the rear-view mirror, and we’ve moved on to not just a new year, but a new decade.
The mood around the city has certainly changed, from the excitement of the boom times in 2010 to the uncertainty we face now. And 2019 certainly didn’t eradicate that uncertainty.
But we still saw some things that should give us reasons for hope, and others that could be viewed as a learning experience.
While it wasn’t something we learned, we were reminded about the generous nature of the community, and how wonderful this city really is. Regardless of whether it was a large-scale fundraiser like the United Way Estevan telethon or the St. Joseph’s Hospital Foundation’s Festival of Trees, or whether it was a fundraiser to help a cause or support a family in need, we saw how often people are willing to go to bat for their fellow residents.
We learned that this community was able to still pull off large-scale events. The Rafferty Rumble was an unqualified hit that brought people to the community and drew people to the downtown area, while creating a buzz in the community.
Late in the year, we found out that Estevan would be hosting the 2022 Centennial Cup national junior A hockey championship. This is a fantastic opportunity for our community to host a national event that will bring hundreds of people to Estevan and generate a projected spinoff of about $3 million.
Any time you get to have an event that brings people here and provides a big spinoff for local businesses, it should be a cause for celebration for everybody.
We saw just how much the residents of the Souris-Moose Mountain constituency care about their country. Regardless of whether you support the current government, or regardless of who you voted for, every person in this riding should be proud that 80 per cent of eligible voters in the riding submitted a ballot in October’s federal election.
We’ve also seen how much dissatisfaction there is with the current federal government, thanks to the truck convoys to Ottawa and Regina, and a growing sentiment regarding western separation that stems from our frustration with policies such as anti-pipeline bills, tanker bans and the carbon tax.
We’ve learned that sometimes the best way to handle something you don’t agree with is to shut up and ignore it, rather than bring more attention to it. That lesson is courtesy of NDP Leader Ryan Meili, after his attack on Estevan’s Jason LeBlanc in the Saskatchewan legislature.
And we’ve continued to see the challenges our community and region will experience moving forward.
We received some good news early in 2019, when we learned that the federal government and SaskPower had reached a long-awaited equivalency agreement. It meant that Unit 4 at Boundary Dam would come offline in 2021, while Unit 5 would be retired in 2024.
Without the pact, these two units, which generate jobs and power, would have come offline at the end of this year. If that would have happened, it would have been a frightening proposition for our city.
At the same, we have to remember that five years goes by very quickly.
We’ve also learned that persistence pays off. We don’t know if the provincial government would have committed $10 million to the coal transition for Estevan and Coronach without the dedication of some local residents, but it certainly didn’t hurt. Now that money needs to be put to good use.
We’ve had to learn that there is a new normal coming to this community, and it’s going to happen much quicker than we wanted. We’re proud to be a coal community, and we’re proud of what coal mining means to the city, but jobs will have to come from other sources moving forward.
It hasn’t always been an easy 12 months for this community. We’ve had ups and downs, and now we’re staring a future that has been dealt to us that we don’t want.
But hopefully in a year or two, we’re writing a different article about what we’ve learned, and how the opportunities have been created.
