Sixteen (or is it eighteen?) years after All About Receiving Cash opened their doors, there is still no plausible explanation for the Wizard's debut in Calgary. While he was certainly well-qualified to coach dodgeball, he had no discernable qualifications or experience to indicate his suitability to run a new treatment facility. AARColytes never tire of repeating the mantra that children were dying on the streets of Calgary until the Wiz rolled into town.
There are many questions that arise from this legend about AARC. The Rotary Club had bankrolled Kids of the Canadian West, and good Dr. Atkinson was appointed the head of it's board. Dr. Atkinson had put his offspring into Kids. The Wizard was working at Kids prior to the creation of K of CW, in spite of the fact that it was an abusive cult, rife with criminal acts ranging from fraud to assault and unlawful confinement. The K of CW project collapsed when prosecutors blew into Kids down in the States.
However, the same backers of Kids, the rotary club, bankrolled AARC which opend a year and a half after K of CW was to open. Lo and behold, the Kids program was implemented by a former Kids employee and using former Kids clients as staff, and bankrolled by the same folks who tried to bring us Kids.
So, the folks who claimed that Calgary's streets were piled high with dead teenaged junkies, and so we needed Kids, gave us AARC.
So who were all of these dead kids? The Calgary parents who sent their offspring to Kids gave us AARC, by way of the Rotary Club. But the Calgary Kids inmates were mostly adults. Who hadn't died, obviously, from drug abuse.
So aside from people who had sent their offspring to Miller Newton, who else would have known about the Wiz? AARC legend says that people were so desperate for help for their children that the Wiz had to travel to CY from Vancouver in the period between the death of K of CW and the birth of AARC. So why bring in the Wiz, who is fresh out of Kids at this point, unless these folks want Kids?
Remember, Dear Readers, before AARC opens, the Wiz is just another freak from Kids. Who would want him to work with children, and why?
Why, after all of these years does this matter? It matters because AARC has been sold by word of mouth and promoted by salesmanship since before it's inception. But who did the selling?