The End Of The RCMP Musical Ride

It was a Canadian institution that played in front of crowds around the world. The red coated Mounties on their trusty steeds will unfortunately be no more. They have been superseded.

The Snowbirds, that crack Royal Canadian Air Force team of aerobatic flyers who have thrilled millions, are now passé.

The Ontario Provincial Police Golden Helmets Precision Motorcycle Team who tour the Province of Ontario giving exhibitions of superb riding skills at fairs, festivals and parades can go back to writing parking tickets.

Yes dear reader, the truth can now be told. The City of Windsor has capped them all.

The secret was in the Greenlink materials online where it stated by Parsons Brinckerhoff that 217 jobs would be created which reflected direct, indirect, and induced employments.

Now that blew my mind since our Mayor had pooh-poohed the amount of maintenance required on these hundreds of acres of Greenlink parkland. I wondered what work would require so many people. The Mayor gave it away on CKLW on a recent Tuesday interview:

• "HOST: What we can do to bring more people, more families and entertain the families that are here already to the City of Windsor? What do we need here, we’ve been taking calls from our listeners this morning, and some of the ideas that came up are a water park, a science museum, things of that nature. Where did this conversation begin and where do you hope it ends?
  
  Mayor Francis: The conversation really began several weeks ago in my State of the City address where I launched, announced a program for Jobs Today. And really the focus is how do we bring more jobs and how do we bring more investment...
  
  And what I said to Council yesterday, is that’s one part of it in terms of attracting jobs and investment. That’s one tool that we can use. Things are so competitive now and we want to bring jobs and we want to bring investment. We need to be firing on all fronts...
  
  we also need to give sense to the fact that when we go to meet investors they say what does your City have to offer? And why is your City different than the city that was just here 15 or 20 minutes ago...
  
  How do we add, how do we bring more family attractions? You know with the rising gas costs and people now sitting on their wallets more than they have in past – that discretionary spending dollar is no longer there."

The plan is brilliant and has been kept secret, under-wraps until now. Obviously what has been created is designed to be the equivalent I would think of the daily Changing of the Guard ceremony on Parliament Hill or at Buckingham Place. Certainly, it will take place in front of our City Hall for tourists as a magnetic draw that will distinguish us from all other cities in the region.

But it is much more than that. Clearly given the number of employees involved there will be touring companies that will travel throughout North America and abroad spreading the name and word of Windsor and drawing attention to us for both tourism and investors.

Through some brilliant investigation, my inside moles were able to take a movie of a dress rehearsal of our new tourist attraction:

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