Over 70 vendors are setting up their booths to welcome visitors to  the Drumheller & District Chamber of Commerce’s Spring Expo at Co-op’s Greentree Mall, including The Drumheller Mail/inside Drumheller. Chamber executive director Heather Bitz said it’s been a number of years since a local trade show has been held. Judging by the amount of positive buzz holding the show has generated, the show should get a great turn out, barring any extreme Alberta weather, of course. The Sping Expo begins Friday night, April 17, and runs from 4 pm. to 8 pm. Expo hours for Saturday are 10 am to 6 pm, and for Sunday, 10 am to 3 PM.
photo by Stacy Allison

Wildrose candidate for Drumheller-Stettler Rick Strankman has apologized and taken down an online advertisement for a fundraiser deemed offensive by many. However, the MLA says most residents of rural Alberta understand the intent of the ad (a copy is shown after the third paragraph below).

   A meet and greet fundraiser advertisement posted to Rick Strankman’s Twitter account made an appeal to supporters to “Take a break from calving, farming, spring work and NHL playoffs” to come the old- fashioned pie auction. At the bottom of the ad it states “BYWP (Bring Your Wife’s Pie!!). Many were quick to suggest the poster displayed a sexist attitude. Strankman saw it differently.

            “It was meant as a completely innocent bunch of comments, and now people are sensitive to that, not necessarily from rural areas, but more of the blowback is from urban areas,” he said. “It was an inappropriate choice of words in some people’s point of view, but those people in rural areas understand what was meant.”

            He says there are more important things to worry about.

            “The province is in monster debt and there are other issues… really, all we want to do is have a little meet and greet, and then it goes viral,” he said.

            He feels the publicity has been valuable.

“It’s been good, we have all the free advertising we can stand,” he said.

He said that the controversy could show the differences between rural and urban voters.

"People have to understand there are differences in many ways - more people need to be tolerant."

“That is a difference in point of view, in a rural areas… primarily in the past, men do the outside work for safety reasons and many other reasons, women do the house work. We don’t take any offense to that, it is more as a specialization.”

  As for the meet and greet, Strankman says it will be going forward.

   “We going to rename it as ‘the partner pie auction,’” he chuckles.