Edmonton Daily Brief · Sources
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One of the strongest recurring daily-brief items available for Edmonton: a single concrete number readers feel. 'Longest ED wait in the Edmonton zone this morning: 10h24m at Fort Saskatchewan.' Twelve Edmonton-zone facilities including Royal Alexandra, University, Misericordia, Grey Nuns, Sturgeon.
WIRED 2026-08-23: read by pipeline/sources/health.py as the `ed_waits` fixture for the page (model-free; raises on failure so the rail records −1). Rendering is the front end's; contract in docs/INSTRUMENTS.md. Live 2026-08-22: 12 Edmonton-zone EDs reporting, longest Misericordia 7 hr 51 min. COMPLETELY UNDOCUMENTED — no link from the public waittimes.aspx page, which renders via a JS bundle. I found it by probing /Webapps/WaitTimes/api/waittimes; the shorter /waittimes/api/waittimes also returns 200. Because it is undocumented it carries no stability guarantee and could move without notice — monitor for schema drift. WaitTime is a preformatted STRING ('3 hr 15 min'), not minutes; parse it. Note field contains HTML entities (&). AHS robots.txt disallows /org/ and /rls/ but not this path. Its mode has no generic collector and no code refers to this endpoint, so nothing fetched it and no health record ever existed. Disabled so the registry stops counting it as coverage; the entry is kept because the endpoint was verified and this is a wiring backlog, not a dead source. See ops/wiring.py. DELIBERATELY NOT WIRED, decided 2026-08-21 after verifying it works. The endpoint is live and good: keyed by city, and d['Edmonton']['Emergency'] returns 12 facilities with a current wait and a link each. The problem is not the source, it is us. This brief is a static page rebuilt about twice a day and ER waits move hourly, so a published number is wrong by the time it is read — and a reader choosing a hospital on a ten-hour-old figure is the harm case, not an inaccuracy case. Publishing it with 'check before you go' would mean the number carries all the risk and none of the value. The honest form is a plain link to the live page, which needs no pipeline. Same reasoning as the emergency alert notice: a copy on a schedule is not an alerting service.
If this is yours and you want it left out, write to hello@edmontondailybrief.ca. We stop reading it and withdraw everything that cited it, past editions included. Every source · How this paper is made
Alberta mode is a guy from Edmonton commenting on the news, and the guy is a machine. One or two lines an item — what somebody who has lived here his whole life would say reading it out to his mates.
It is not the story. The headline above each comment is the real one, the source link below it goes to the real reporting, and the plain edition is one click away. He is not summarising anything and he is not a reporter; he is the guy at the shop with an opinion about it.
He swears when a sentence wants it. He is rude about council, developers, the province, the weather, the roads and the Oilers, and never about the people in the story. He holds about a dozen opinions that contradict each other and he is fine with that.
Some of it will sit wrong anyway. When it does, that is on us and we would rather hear it than not: corrections@edmontondailybrief.ca, and we will pull the line.
Two things get no comment at all, and they are not negotiable: anyone charged or before a court, who has a trial coming and is entitled to have us stay out of it, and a suicide. Anything you need to ACT on — a tip line, an advisory, an evacuation — keeps its full text underneath the comment, because a phone number does not go behind a joke.
The plain edition is the record, and it is the default. It is one click away and it is where you should check anything before you act on it.