Have you heard?!? There's an "AI data centre" growing like a giant cyst on the arse of Regina? It'll be gobbling up 1.2 gigawatts of power, they're saying. And it's unlikely to be the only data centre built in Saskatchewan.
That sounds… significant?
Simon Enoch from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives educates us on everything data centre on the latest Queen City Improvement Bureau.
It's council catch up day on the Queen City Improvement Bureau! Council changed the Brandt/REAL Deal & WE HAVE QUESTIONS! Plus, Tsiklis' Project Service Prioritization Motion does not make the grade. Nor does it cut the mustard. Also! Skuare & new/old municipal merch. Originally broadcast on 91.3FM CJTR AccessNow community radio. Music by Guidewire (aka Ryan Hill).
Council just voted 6 to 4 to amend the Brandt/REAL Deal. Voting against: Flores, Froh, Radons & Zachidniak. The mayor, Burton, Mancinelli, Rashovich, Tsiklis, Turnbull voted in favour. Bezo left the meeting before the vote.
Under the new terms, Brandt will operate & maintain the AffinityPlex, Cooperators Ctr, Mosaic Stadium & Confederation Park.
In other words Brandt will be operating and maintaining all of the REAL campus for a term of up to 20 years.
(Note: Brandt is NOT BUYING those facilities. AffinityPlex, Cooperators Ctr, Mosaic Stadium & Confederation Park will continue to be city-owned facilties.)
As the city will continue to own those facilities, the city will still be responsible for the costs of capital upgrades.
Today's vote is not the final word on the Brandt/REAL Deal. It just changes the terms under which the city's bargaining team will be operating. There is still no final deal with Brandt. (Which means that there is still time for more changes.)
For context… Currently, the city pays REAL (a municipal corporation wholly owned by the city & as such, must report to council during every budget period) for access to those four community-owned facilities. The city then charges community groups a discounted rate for access to the blocks of time the city has purchased.
If this deal with Brandt is finalized, the city will pay Brandt for access to these city facilities — facilities that we own.
For user groups, little will change as rates for community groups will continue to be set by the Leisure Fee Bylaw.
Aidan and I will be talking about this on the next Queen City Improvement Bureau, Thur 7pm on 91.3FM CJTR AccessNow community radio.
And i live tweeted this whole council meeting on Bluesky so you read the whole thing (in reverse chronological order) here: https://bsky.app/profile/pauldechene.bsky.social
The Queen City Improvement Bureau dives DEEP into the numbers with Luke Grazier, the city's manager of city projects. We talk about Regina's "economic indicators," "affordability trends," "housing statistics," and "parking lots!"
It's wonkerific! But also, fun for the whole family!
If you want to read the 2026 Growth Monitoring Report that we're talking about in this episode, you can find it on the city's website here: https://www.regina.ca/about-regina/maps/neighbourhood-profiles/#outline-growth-monitoring-report
QCIB theme by Ryan Hill (aka Guidewire). Originally broadcast on 91.3FM CJTR AccessNow community radio.
Councillor Victoria Flores and council-watcher Liam Colhoun recap this summer's City Council Boot Camp and the Mock City Council for Youth.
Plus, the Leader Post reports that Regina city administration are considering an AI data centre policy.
Also, the downtown mosque gathered 220 survey responses (only 30 of which came from people living w/in 1km of the mosque) and submitted them to the Regina Police Service, as part of their application to broadcast the call to prayer on Fridays. They announced on July 31 that their application was successful.
They will, however, have to re-apply for a permit every week if they want to continue broadcasting the call-to-prayer.
By the way, I was outside the Regina City Jamia Masjid for the Aug 7 call to prayer and the sky did not fall! Plus, CTV's Wayne Mantyka, who was also there, checked how far the call could be heard from and reports that he could barely hear it from around the corner. So, turns out worries that it would be waking babies in ward 2 were overblown.
Originally broadcast on 91.3FM CJTR, AccessNow community radio.
Unanimous vote. Globe theatre request for $1.38mil in emergency funding is APPROVED! #yqrcc
Regina City Jamia Masjid is holding a public consultation today about their call to prayer. Councillors Dan Rashovich (ward1) and David Froh (ward 3) took questions from the media. I've posted audio of both press scrums to the Queen City Improvement Bureau blog.
Spoilers… Clr Rashovich says he is opposed to the call to prayer being broadcast downtown. Clr Froh says it's none of council's business (my words, not his).
Rebel News is intent on turning Regina's call-to-prayer story into a national media circus so I've posted audio from Friday's press conference at the Regina City Jamia Masjid along with my commentary on the absurdity of standing next to Canada's Right-Wing Nutjob Laureate, Rebel New's Ezra Levant.
I've chopped the press conference up into 2-3 minute clips to make the event more easily digested.
The Queen City Improvement Bureau escaped the subbasement and rode the #60 Arcola Express out to the sustainable Tim's on Chuka Boulevard. We ate donuts! With guests!
With us on our fried-dough adventure: transit union president Sukhwinder Gainda, transit operator Colin Lea-Wilson, and Ward 8 City Councillor Shanon Zachidniak! We talk transit, free transit, transit troubles!
BTW… we chose the #60 Arcola Express as the route for this episode because, at 40 MINUTES LONG, the bus ride would take up a significant chunk of our hour long show, leaving us just enough time to fit donut eating in at the end. Which begs the question, why are Regina's "express*"* routes so freaking long?
With the city working on a new Downtown Neighbourhood Plan Action Plan (see their beheard.regina.ca page on that), I thought it'd be worth looking back at what the original draft of the Downtown Neighbourhood Plan looked like when it was released to the public in May 2009. I've uploaded all the PDFs to the Queen City Improvement Bureau blog. (I believe you can also get these from the city's opendata portal but I pulled these from a dusty corner of my harddrive.)
While the city has included a link on their beheard page to the Downtown Neighbourhood Plan as it appears in the Official Community Plan bylaw, the documents I've shared include many more water colour concept images of what Regina’s downtown could look like, and a lot more of the thinky prose which was ultimately translated into drier bylaw-speak.
For the record, I'm not posting these just as a fun tour down memory lane, but rather because I think the original Downtown Plan documents provide a much more fleshed out version of what the community came together to envision. The public engagement sessions for the DNP were extensive, having taken place over months; and, covering those meetings was one of the first multi-part city hall stories I undertook. I remember being pretty jazzed when the draft plan was released and read them cover to cover.
Oh, how young & full of enthusiasm I was.
Then, when the bylaw version came out three years later I remember going over them and thinking, "Hmmm… less cool."
So yeah, if you care about downtown and wonder why the dream of downtown revitalization hasn't seemed to get very far, well… it might be worth having a look at what the city once claimed it was aiming for.
Note, these pdfs are not the version of the plan that council ultimately voted on. After a public feedback period, admin brought a revised document forward in August of that year. I'll write about the differences between the two DNPs at a later date. There were some noteworthy changes.
The city is giving its Downtown Plan a refresh and so they have a BeHeard page* set up as the centre for their online consultation. There's a survey available right now where you can provide some thoughts about what downtown needs to succeed and blahblahblah. Scroll down the page a bit to find the survey tab.
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Footnote:
* In case you haven't heard about it, (and why should you have? unlike me, you have a life) beheard.regina.ca is the site for all of the city's online community engagement. You can do surveys, post ideas, ask questions, read reports. It's almost like a social media site for city hall nerds. Other stuff on there right now are the Wascana Parkway extension project, the 2027 budget, the parking tax subclass, the accessibility plan, a centre square planning study, and much more. It updates often.
I am not a fan of the discussion that our new council has been having over the fare-free transit pilot project that was run this year at Johnson Collegiate. In short: I don't think council is reading the report correctly and, even if they were, the pilot was too short to say anything definite anyway. On top of that, they're being dim about the program's price tag. Of course, I had to spend a chunk of my free time over the last week expanding all that out into a 2,000 word essay on the Queen City Improvement Bureau blog.
I think in all those words I wrote I left out my personal opinion on what council should do next, so here I go: They should run the fare-free transit pilot for at least another year and they should probably expand it to one or more high schools. Though, if they choose to only continue it at Johnson Collegiate, that's at least better than leaving it where it is now — which is nowhere.
We were pretty burned out on city hall content after our live show. Yeah, the CVAF show looks like a bunch of goofs but putting together the Name That Noisemaker Quiz requires listening back over a lot of old council meetings. Writing the script for the Shaun Semple bit meant diving deep into that local millionaire's psyche. And the Municipal Anthem? It drug up a lot of feels.
So, to give our brain-mud time to lie fallow, we spent this week's show with local art-pop actualizer Natural Sympathies. We talked about their new album. And we took their Love Survey. We will be back to covering all the council drama on our Thursday show (June 4 at 7pm). I believe we'll be talking about the fare free transit pilot at Johnson Collegiate. And concrete. The QCIB broadcasts live on on 91.3 FM CJTR.
This was recorded live at the Artesian on May 20 2026 during the Cathedral Village Arts Festival. Our guests for the Name That Noisemaker Quiz were former city hall reporter Pat Book and former city councillor Cheryl Stadnichuk. Music & on-stage banter provided by Ron Loos. Other collaborators/co-conspirators were Carter Stenberg (as Shaun Semple), Ada the Typical 20 Year Old Girl, and Stella Sale. Photos by Allan Hall. Many thanks to Jo, Neil & Pearl for behind-the-scenes support. Broadcast on 91.3FM CJTR, AccessNow Community Radio.
Mancinelli's concrete reduction report goes council tomorrow (May 27). This is the report that's supposed to look at, among other things, reducing the number of sidewalks in new and existing neighbourhoods.
Admin doesn't make as strong a case for keeping sidewalks as I'd like, but I suppose this will have to do.
The report does consider alternatives to concrete in the construction of sidewalks and medians but it's interesting that the only *real* alternative it presents — if cost saving is your only concern — is asphalt.
The other options are either more expensive outright or provide zero real savings once you factor in the material's lifespan.
There's a lot more to say on this report (and I said quite a bit more over on Bsky) but to me one of the most glaring omissions is a note about how asphalt is inferior to concrete because it's just so effing ugly.
How embarrassing for us as a "modern city" that at every turn we're considering the trashiest option for our public realm.
"Move to Regina! It's as cheap as it looks!"
Put that on a billboard in Halifax.
The Queen City Improvement Bureau welcomes two representatives from next week's Cathedral Village Arts Festival: Don Young, Festival director, & Andrew Stevens, Festival waste management specialist (and former city councillor). They preview some of what's coming up at this years CVAF. Stevens is offered a chance to trade his position as Festival Garbage Man with another term on city council. (Spoilers: the overflowing garbage bin wins. By which I mean his Festival gig.) We also talk about the REAL/Brandt Deal, the bananapants controversy swirling around the Globe's production of "Little Red Warrior & His Lawyer", porn theatres in the 70s and Star Wars films. Originally broadcast on 91.3FM CJTR AccessNow community radio.
New QCIB! You know what this deal to sell half of the REAL campus to Brandt sounds like? One big honkin' innovative revenue tool. So WHY THE HECK wasn't the Queen City Improvement Bureau consulted on this? Innovative Revenue Tools are our whole thing. Oh, we get it. No one wants our valuable insights! Well, we're putting them out in a podcast anyway.
This week, we take a look at the council meetings that closed the deal with Brandt and at claims by a certain former mayor about their record on property taxes.
Originally broadcast on 91.3FM CJTR Accessnow community radio.
Least surprising council outcome ever: In a vote of 8 to 3, Regina city council ratified their decision to approve the sale of 1/2 of REAL to the Brandt corporation for $6.5million. Sold properties include the Brandt Centre, the Queensbury and the QC Distillery. Only councillors Radons, Flores and Zachidniak voted against.
Admin noted that there is still a lot of work to be done to close the deal & produce the requisite legal contracts; they also cautioned that there is still a chance of the two parties reaching an impasse in this final stage of negotiation but did not anticipate that coming to pass as there is a lot of goodwill between the City & Brandt.
No big surprise that council gave the Brandt deal a big ol' thumbs up when you consider the whole of the Regina Illuminati threw their weight behind it, either by sending in approving communications or attending in person to sing the deal's praises. On Regina's dance card yesterday were such luminaries as the head of the WHL; the CEOs of Mosaic, Bunge and the Regina & Region Homebuilders Assn; the entire Semple family; and, not one but TWO former mayors, in the flesh: Michael Fougere and Pat Fiacco.
Two oldtimers suddenly appearing to show the new guy with the cool hair & suit how it's done… Why, it was like a Doctor Who anniversary special. But for Regina Mayors!
(Sandra Masters couldn't make it because she was trapped in a time vortex.)
Speaking of (mayors, not Doctor Who)… about the only surprising thing to happen during this meeting was when Councillor Tsiklis asked former mayor Fiacco about the alleged "multiple zero percent mill rate increases" that were passed during his term.
Fiacco's response? To claim that they're "a myth." He never passed "multiple" zero percents. There was only one zero percent and it was in 2009.
I found this rather odd b/c I've been covering city council for too f*cking long and I've double, triple & quadruple checked the assertion that council passed multiple zero percent mill rate increases while Fiacco was mayor. So, hearing Fiacco's rebuttal, and not wanting to contribute to any misinformation about Regina's Favourite Mayor, I went back and quintuple checked, fully prepared to apologize grovellingly for my error. ,
And yeah… Fiacco was correct that he passed a zero percent mill rate increase in 2009.
But that wasn't the only one. And I don't know how he can say otherwise. If there's some detail I'm missing, I'd love to hear it. But I'm literally pulling information from the city's opendata portal.
According to city budget documents — produced during Fiacco's 12 year term — there were other zero percent municipal mill rate increases.
In fact, in the course of quintuple checking Fiacco's mill rate record, I discovered another zero percent I didn't know about until yesterday! And it involved some pretty interesting council drama, to boot.
I discuss it all in that video link.
That video, btw… I was thinking I might start doing short live council updates to youtube while I'm making coffee during breaks in council meetings. By which I mean, that video is very lo-fi. And you get to see me operate a Cafelat Robot espresso maker. If you think posting live council updates is a useful habit for me to get into… I don't know… give the vid a like or some shit.
We will be discussing the Brandt Deal on the Queen City Improvement Bureau tonight (May 7) at 7pm on 91.3FM CJTR AccessNow community radio. You can listen on a real live radio or through the AccessNow website https://accessnowradio.ca/live/
Certified Improvement Vector, Pat Book, visits the subbasement to talk about the experience of being the lone dissenting speaker on the REAL/Brandt Deal at the Apr 29 2026 Executive Committee meeting.
Incidentally, the pic we used for the episode title card is a reaction shot of Pat Book right after Councillor Mark Burton asked him a question that references Donald Trump. We'll have to post a clip of that soon because it's one for the ol' City Council Scrap Book.
Music by Guidewire (aka Ryan Hill). Originally broadcast on 91.3FM CJTR AccessNow community radio. We broadcast live every Thursday at 7pm and are rebroadcast Mondays at 3pm.
This is a post by Pat Book about the city's deal to sell-off half of REAL to Brandt. Pat's one of the smartest city-hall watchers I know and this is the best breakdown I've read on this subject so far. But Pat isn't on Reddit so he said I could post this here on his behalf. I've pulled this from his Facebook page. It is very much worth reading.
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Maybe you’ve seen the #yqrcc news stories about Brandt trying to buy half of the REAL district (exhibition grounds to you old heads) land and buildings from the city. The headline is they’d pay $6.5 million dollars - because the condition of the buildings is so depreciated it would take almost $80 million to bring them up to like new conditions.
I read the full report today and have at least 30 questions I will probably outline in detail in a post too long for anyone to bother reading. But for now, there are some real fundamental concerns with the notion that the city will “make” $6.5 million from this. Because true to form, Shaun Semple’s deal seems to be remarkably self-serving.
Costs to the city that jumped out to me and were not mentioned in reporting so far include:
These are costs, but there are also a bunch of areas where the city is passing up theoretical revenue. The problem is that they can’t get it without changing how REAL does business. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that REAL could do all the things Brandt is likely to do with the space…if we wanted it to.
But this report presents this whole morass as a binary choice - either we sell, or we’re on the hook for a theoretical $80 million in infrastructure debt. But the city obviously wouldn’t bring all of those buildings up to “like new” condition if it retained them, so it seems to me like a third option of “do anything else because the status quo is clearly not working” should be on the menu for council. It just isn’t.
