There are a lot of similarities between St. Albert and St. Boniface, and much that our city could learn from the history of the Manitoba community — beginning with the danger of procrastination.
St. Boniface was among the first settled areas of Manitoba. A Roman Catholic mission founded in 1818, it became the mother parish for many French settlements in Western Canada. It has its own hospital, its own Catholic school system, its own arts and culture and for more than 150 years was its own community, then town, then city.
St. Albert was founded in 1861 by French-Canadian Roman Catholic priest Father Albert Lacombe, who came west from St. Boniface. St. Albert has its own hospital, its own Catholic school system, its own arts and culture and for more than 150 years has been its own community, then town and now city.
And unless St. Albert learns from the history of St. Boniface, it is destined to follow its history and disappear from the maps of Canada, to be absorbed by the giant figure growing next to it. In the case of St. Boniface, it was Winnipeg, which outgrew all its surrounding communities by being more aggressive in its development and more open in welcoming industrial and commercial growth. While St. Boniface and other communities were figuring out their future directions, Winnipeg overwhelmed them and in 1971 absorbed them all into the City of Winnipeg.
For St. Albert, that giant is obviously Edmonton. While St. Albert has twiddled its thumbs over its future, Edmonton is rapidly building light industrial and commercial areas that now touch Anthony Henday Drive. The next step is the leap over the road.
The completion of the Henday could have been the line in the sand between the two cities, something to allow St. Albert to retain its identity and its status as a separate city. Instead it may become just another road that may delay the inevitable but not stop it.
Why is it? Simply put, it’s procrastination on the part of St. Albert city councils. Not just this council but many before it. St. Albert simply is unable to make a decision without numerous studies or hiring overpaid consultants to tell us what we already know, or holding public meetings attended mostly by those who will tell council only what it wants to hear.
Nearly 400 years ago, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, the Spanish novelist who wrote the classic Don Quixote, said: “Delay always breeds danger; and to protract a great design is often to ruin it.”
One of the problems here is St. Albert doesn’t appear to have any great design, no vision of its future, which leads to indecision. Council has been hesitant to commit to more land for light industrial and on Monday it postponed another decision on lands until next spring.
Yes, council is under pressure from landowners and residential developers. But council was elected to make decisions about the city’s future. To step back and simply delay is inviting Edmonton to sweep across the Henday and absorb everything in its wake. We are ripples on the pond and Edmonton is a giant wave headed our way.
