(paNOW Staff/Nigel Maxwell)

By Nick Nielsen

Open for Tender

For Sale: Town of Duck Lake’s naming rights

Oct 23, 2025 | 3:47 PM

The Town of Duck Lake could soon find itself named something entirely different if the right corporate sponsor decides to step up. The town has announced that the naming rights to Duck Lake are officially on the market.

Mayor Jason Anderson thought of the idea when reading an article about large stadiums getting massive payouts from selling the naming rights to their building. Anderson doesn’t know if there’s any interest, but he figures there’s no harm in asking the question.

Originally, Anderson thought of just selling the naming rights to some of the public buildings in town like the rink or town hall, but then he thought there was a way to make a bigger splash.

“I thought, man, with the amount of money that those guys are making off of this, I wonder if there’s actually something else that we could have that might be of some value from some people that maybe they would look at this and say, ‘hey, you know what? We like this idea. We’d love to have our own name on that.’ So I thought, well, let’s give it a try, let’s go with the town’s name and let’s see what happens.”

When it comes to the value of the town’s name, Anderson sees a lot of potential there. Not only would the renaming of a town catch a ton of attention in the media all over the province and likely the rest of the country, there would be more permanent values Anderson could see added as well.

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“There is over 6,000 vehicles that are passing by our town on Highway 11, and we still have Highway 212 too. They would have their name on the GPS, and they would have their name on the maps, and on the Weather Network and all of those ones. That’s worldwide. So, is that enough for a company to actually seriously consider? Possibly, but you’ll never know if you don’t ever ask the question.”

While a lot of this announcement is in good fun, Anderson said that there is some serious issues that it could address. For one, Duck Lake is the home of Métis people and is the site where the first shots were fired in the 1885 Riel Rebellion.

Anderson said that any company that does seriously consider taking over the name of Duck Lake would have to be a company that shares the values of the Métis.

“They have to respect our history here. They have to share our same kind of values and ideals because if not, there is no way that the townspeople are ever going to go for this one at all.”

As for the price tag, it isn’t going to be cheap for just any company to swoop in and suddenly put their name on the map. Anderson said there isn’t a specific price set for what the naming rights of the town will cost, but if the total can take care of some of the town’s major infrastructure projects, that would make them consider it.

“If there was a company that came in that said, ‘we’ll give you $1 million a year for the next 20 years, 25 years’, something along that line, that does some serious projects for our town. That starts accomplishing everything that we could actually use here. $10 million is bare bones because we need to replace our water and sewer lines before we can actually do our roads properly, and if it’s $10 million, that’s all gone in one shot, just like that, but then that part of our infrastructure is done and we didn’t have to jack our taxes in order to do it. Will the residents look at that though? Will they be happy enough with that? I don’t know.”

Anderson continued with another possible solution, “Let’s say it was a company that said, ‘we’ll give you $5 million, but if our name’s going to be there, we’re going to move our corporate office over into your town’, and let’s say they have a manufacturing plant and they want to move one of those here too. That’s bringing a whole bunch of jobs to our market also. Is that something worth exploring?”

Ultimately, the decision on whether or not to rename the town of Duck Lake to anything else is going to come down to the residents, who would have to vote on any final approval to change the town’s name no matter what during their next public meeting at the end of April.

For now, the question has been posed and tenders are open until March 31st.

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nick.nielsen@pattisonmedia.com