Forget the Cold Lake Air Weapons Range deal and the mud slinging between Bonnyville and Cold Lake. Let's let bygones be bygones and move on to working together as friends and neighbours rather than pitted against one another by politics and finances.
There is nothing like a mutual enemy to assure cooperation, to forget about petty things and to welcome our neighbours into our homes (or, as the case may be, arenas) as we cheer them on to victory.
The Cold Lake Jr. B Ice has decided to temporary relocate to the R.J. Lalonde Arena for the home games against the Killam Wheat Kings in the North Eastern Alberta Junior B Hockey League championship and there weren't any fans in the stands yelling about bombing range tax reassessments or sulking that Cold Lake got the Walmart and Bonnyville didn't.
It was refreshing to see Bonnyville and Cold Lake come together for once for something positive rather than the never-ending bickering over politics.
Maybe Craig Copeland and Ernie Isley (Cold Lake and Bonnyville's mayors, respectively) can learn a thing or two from the open-armed and positive reception the Cold Lake Ice got this past Saturday, greeted by wild cheers and applause as they skated out onto Bonnyville ice.
Sure, a lot of the crowd probably made the trek from Cold Lake to cheer their team on but there were a lot of familiar faces in the audience as well, and when Cold Lake Ice forward and Glendon product Denis Cadrin scored in the second period of sudden death overtime, no one was thinking about the fact that it was a Cold Lake team that just won.
It was an amazing hockey game that most people in Bonnyville wouldn't have had the opportunity to see if not for a little bit of inter-community cooperation.
So how can we apply this lesson to the sour diplomatic relations between Cold Lake and Bonnyville? Can lessons learned at a hockey game be applied in this instance?
Maybe, if Cold Lake and Bonnyville politicians saw fit to band together against a mutual enemy like the provincial government for putting us in this awkward us-vs.-them mentality to begin with. Or maybe if they decided to use their combined powers to go after a provincial municipal funding system that caused both community's infrastructure to crumble around us before there was any thought of helping the region out at all.
Maybe, instead of talking about who's anti-Cold Lake and who's anti-Bonnyville, we can look outside of the situation and talk about why the part of the province that is driving Canada's economy can't afford to pave their roads or build affordable housing.
