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In Thursday’s provincial budget, Finance Minister Doug Horner said all the right things about innovation, creating and bringing knowledge-based, made-in-Alberta products to the world.
Such announcements are always made with great fanfare.
The results, interestingly enough, never capture the same attention.
But results there are. The business landscape of Greater Edmonton is increasingly populated by successful technology companies that, in their early days, used government or non-profit agency help in starting their businesses – a societal investment that have earned a major return in new wealth creation and new tax revenue.
Nine years ago, Jerry Hanna incorporated Clearflow Enviro Systems Group Inc. to commercialize a water cleaning process he’d developed with the assistance of researchers at the University of Alberta’s Water Initiative.
Today, two to three tractor-trailer loads of Water Lynx, Clearflow’s patented flocculant and coagulant products, l ...
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Stages Kitchen & Bar
Doubletree by Hilton West Edmonton,
16615 109 Avenue
780-484-0821 (hotel front desk)
Food: 4 of 5 Suns
Ambience: 3 of 5 Suns
Service: 3.5 of 5 Suns
Dinner for two, excluding tip, taxes and beverages – Basic, $50; loaded, $100
In the spirit of Sunday’s Academy Awards, the envelope please … The “Best of Modern Alberta” culinary award goes to executive chef Willie White and crew at the Stages Kitchen & Bar in the new Doubletree by Hilton West Edmonton!!!!
Given Stages is hotel-owned and operated and is a mega-restaurant to boot, with over 300 seats off the hotel foyer in a bar, lounge, buffet, breakfast and proper dining configuration, our (fictional) award is all the more unusual. Hotels rarely produce first-rate restaurants, certainly not in this town (outside of the Fairmont Hotel Macdonald’s Harvest Room) over the last few decades. The Doubletree, incidentally, is the re-branded Mayfield Inn, now renovated from top to bott ...
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Much as I dislike the term “social licence” - with “sustainability” the two most overused words in the language - it’s an apt description for attitudinal changes happening within our still-controversial oilsands.
Sensible environmentalism appears to be gaining an upper hand. When the lone Green Party MLA in the B.C. Legislature endorses the oilsands upgrader/refinery proposal in Prince Rupert as a pragmatic compromise, you know the times are changing.
There’s recognition by most Canadian environmental watchdogs that cost-effective, cleaned up fossil fuels will still be needed in this century as the global economy transitions to a mix of clean oil and other sustainable (yech, there’s that word again!) energy sources.
The argument is not about shutting down the oilsands, it’s anxiety about the pace of production, about the cumulative environmental impact of doubling production from two million barrels per day (mbpd) now to 4.5 mbpd by 2025.
I ...
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Creole Envie
6509 112 Ave.
780-477-2422
www.creoleenevie.net
Food: 3.5 of 5
Ambience: 4 of 5
Service: 4 of 5
Dinner for two, excluding beverages, tips and taxes. Basic, $30; loaded, $60.
In the bleak haul from Valentine’s to St. Paddy’s, to find just a little joy in late winter, head to a New Orleans cookery.
Creole and Cajun cuisine are all about sunshine and the deep south, about crayfish, okra, southern-fried chicken, oysters, jambalaya, catfish, hot peppers and beans.
In the American melting pot, Cajun/Creole is one of last truly regional cooking styles, around and refined since the French-speaking Acadians, Afro and Euro Americans started trading recipes in what’s now Louisiana, some 260 years ago.
Greater Edmonton now has four restaurants that cook Creole/Cajun (the styles are very similar): The ever-popular DaDeO on Whyte Avenue, Louisiana Purchase off the downtown, St. Albert’s Cajun House and now, Creole Envie.
In the historic Highlands’ com ...
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As goes the Edmonton International Airport (EIA), so goes YEG.
The airport’s well-being is the best indicator of regional economic health I can think of.
The more jingle in our pockets, the more leisure flying we do.
“YEG,” the aviation industry’s ID for the Edmonton International Airport, is replacing “Edmonton” as the city’s name on social media!
As companies grow, more employees travel. Skilled energy workers now fly from here to contracts in Africa, Central Asia, the Middle East and Russia.
In 2000, Phase I of the airport’s terminal expansion opened. The airport has since tripled in physical size.
Passenger numbers have grown from four million in 2000, to seven million in 2013, to an expected 10 million in 2020. Not included are the 500,000 passengers per year using YEG’s private terminals to fly to the oilsands.
In 2000, YEGites usually went via Calgary to trans-border, international and often Canadian destinations.
Unless you& ...
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The Glass Monkey
5842-111 St.
780 760 2228
TheGlassMonkey.ca
Food: 4 of 5 Suns
Ambience: 4 of 5 Suns
Service: 4 of 5 Suns
Dinner for two, excluding beverages, tips and taxes. Basic, $30; loaded, $60
In 1999, The Matrix starring Keanu Reeves was a classic science-fiction movie, one of the best.
But its two sequels were abysmal, nothing but chase scenes.
Someday, somewhere, somebody will create a new sequel truly worthy of the original Matrix, building on its themes, plots, technical and artistic brilliance.
Back in its day, Jack’s Grill was The Matrix of Edmonton’s restaurant scene, the very best restaurant in town in the Lendrum strip mall near Southgate shopping centre.
Owner/chef Peter Jackson retired to Nova Scotia, sold Jack’s Grill to his manager.
It was an inferior Matrix sequel. Food quality dropped, prices didn’t. No surprise, Jack’s Grill the sequel went belly up.
Here’s great news.
Jack’s Grill’s true and rightful seq ...
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On Thursday, Feb. 6, 2014, Mayor Don Iveson and Katz Group brass announced that the owner of the Edmonton Oilers, the lead tenant and operator of the downtown arena had also been chosen to build and operate what’s likely the last new high-rise office tower the city will see for many years – thanks to a long-term City of Edmonton lease.
And that on land crucial to the arena precinct’s development strategy.
It could have opened a can of worms, torn the scabs off the healing wounds from those difficult arena negotiations.
But it went smooth as silk.
Barely a week later, city hall was temporarily decorated as a hockey rink for an announcement by the mayor and Daryl Katz himself. Arena construction would start in March. Builder PCL and operator Katz were on the hook for any costs beyond $480 million.
It was another deal that still had the potential to fall apart, to have seen Iveson crucified in the media.
But once again, all was smooth.
That same afternoon, Iveson commented ...
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This Romeo and Juliet sets The Citadel ablaze
Graham Hicks review
Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
Citadel Theatre – Maclab Stage
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
April 5 – 27, 2014
Ticket information
The opening to the Tom Wood-directed Romeo and Juliet will stay emblazoned in my memory as long as there is memory upon which to be emblazoned.
Eighteen cast members on the stage (plus nine teen apprentices) are fighting, some with sword-play in the initial Montague/Capulet brawl.
It’s a swirling galaxy of choreography, initially in slow motion to pounding lights and music, then shifting gears to real life speed, finally, slowly, winding down as the elders of the two warring houses and the rulers show up to sort things out.
I don’t know about you, but I’m a sucker for big fight scenes, especially when the actors are in the prime of their athletic lives as these kids on either side of 30 are – rolling and flipping and dancing with those swords, up ‘n’ over ...
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Graham Hicks review
The Invention of Romance
By Conni Massing - world premiere
Workshop West Theatre
La Cite Francophone, 8627 91 St.
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Through April 13, 2014
Playwright Conni Massing can pull in an audience all by herself, because the turf she occupies is so darned honest, and sweet, and insightful … and pure prairie-grown cracked wheat.
Her writing stays comfortably within memories and stories of Central Alberta, of small-town incidents, of people who leave for the big-cities but the country never quite leaves them. Just look at the titles – The Aberhart Summer, Jake and the Kid, Gravel Run, Dustsluts, Homesick …
She’s the reason I made my first trek to a Workshop West Theatre production in many a year, for the premiere of her latest play, The Invention of Romance, playing in La Cite Francophones’s performing space through April 13.
The play I had no trouble with, though it’s a tad loose and will be better a much better scri ...
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Mary Poppins
A musical based on the stories of P.L. Travers and the Walt Disney Film
Shoctor Stage, Citadel Theatre, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada through April 20, 2014
Ticket information. (Buy quickly. This show is going to sell out, especially at the low-end $35 rate)
Review by GRAHAM HICKS
Posted at www.hicksbiz.com March 21, 2014
780 707 6379
graham.hicks@hicksbiz.com
@hicksonsix
How wondrous the Citadel/Theatre Calgary stage production of Mary Poppins (The Broadway Musical)!
How mysterious that Mary Poppins, despite the 1964 Walt Disney movie, the West End/Broadway production of 10 years ago, and at least five songs that have burned their way into the memories of most of the English-speaking world, remains a lesser figure in the pantheon of favourite children’s fictional characters. At least that’s the case in North America. The original book of Mary Poppins by P.L. Travers, didn’t travel well across the Atlantic, and the entire Mary Poppins’ series (eight books) made ...
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