Category: Hicks on Biz columns from The Edmonton Sun
Hicks on Biz columns from The Edmonton Sun
There’s a sinking feeling in the city’s development community, worry that the mighty “aspirational” Blatchford Lands – the City of Edmonton’s 540-acre redevelopment of the now-closed Municipal Airport – will be yet another white elephant.
A white elephant: When a big project starts with the best of intentions and an optimistic budget, but ends up taking twice as long, costing twice as much, and delivering a fraction of what was promised.
Blatchford started off as a city council dream. So much open land, so close to downtown, could be used to show the world how eco-sensitive Edmonton was.
Blatchford is being marketed as a 30,000-resident neighbourhood with the very latest in environmental technologies, renewable energy, lovely lakes and paddle boats, no cars, lots of bikes – so attractive that thousands of families will pay premium prices to purchase brand-new eco-homes in this super-eco-neighbourhood that’s far away from the river valley but very close ...
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One really shouldn’t be so foolish as to predict Edmonton’s economy.
It’s like predicting how the Oilers will do. Who, six months ago, would have predicted our hockey team’s current dire straits?
This column has been all gloom and doom on the future of Edmonton and Alberta’s economy.
I’ve been arguing that the now-three-year crash in oil and gas prices shows no sign of let-up, that construction is slowing, that “carbon restraint” is clamping down on global demand for our oil and gas and at the same time raising Alberta’s electricity costs: That sky-rocketing provincial debt and a perceived anti-business bias from the current provincial government has scared off investment in Alberta.
Not a pretty picture.
But in the past few weeks a flurry of economic forecasts are painting a more optimistic future – at least for 2018 and 2019.
The basic theory seems to be that things have been so bad — a 3% drop in Alberta’s economic output ...
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Little stories that deserve to be bigger … save the downtown, the oil patch and clean coal, but save us from city council and misleading marketing!
DISPOSABLE DOWNTOWN?
Do buildings now depreciate as fast as cars?
In 1982, city council signed the death warrant on yet another historic Edmonton landmark. The historic Tegler Building came tumbling down so the Bank of Montreal (BMO) could construct a brand-new, glass-fronted regional headquarters in the heart of the downtown.
The handsome, seven-story Tegler Building, with its brick exterior and Woolworth’s on the main floor, was a mere 70 years old. Judging from older office buildings in older cities, it had plenty of life left in it.
Now the BMO building, only 33 years old (it opened in 1984), has a date with the wrecker’s ball.
The bank has downsized into the next-door, brand-new Enbridge Tower. Regency Developments intends to tear down the BMO building and build a mixed-use high-rise on the site.
The BMO building ...
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Happily, I’m on the hook to pay for a fancy dinner with my former boss John Caputo, now the Sun/Postmedia’s head of advertising for Western Canada.
In June, Hicks on Biz predicted a serious financial downturn in Edmonton by the end of October, i.e. this month.
Financial blood would be running on the street, I said, caused by the slowdown in the oilsands, the slowdown in all Northern Alberta construction and manufacturing, higher income and corporate taxes, minimum wage increases and the enormous debt being run up by this free-spending provincial government.
It would all hit home, I said, with a sudden, thudding recession starting in October.
Caputo, ever the optimist, took issue with the forecast.
So we made a bet: A fine dinner, to be paid for by whoever was wrong.
That was me. Hooray!
Today, most credible economic forecasters – the Conference Board of Canada, Edmonton Chief Economist John Rose and others – are predicting a higher-than-average 4% growth this year ...
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If I were running for Edmonton’s city council on Oct. 16, this would be my back-to-basics platform.
City council’s first responsibility should be to the taxpayer, not the frivolous tax-user.
Cleanse city council of “progressive” multi-million-dollar vanity projects, such as over-built bike lanes (never has so much been spent on so few, with so little in return).
Bring fiscal conservativism back in favour. How can city council save taxpayers’ money, not spend it? Property taxes only provide enough money to maintain public infrastructure (roads, bridges, parks), to provide excellent police, fire and transit services.
Leave the funding of social services — culture, social housing, social programs, recreational programs, libraries, etc. — to the provincial government with its much broader tax base. I love the Edmonton Public Library, but it should be funded from the provincial purse.
Aim for true carbon reduction. The purchase of new city buses, for instanc ...
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I once interviewed former Edmonton mayor Steve Mandel, just as he was considering running for mayor. It was a ho-hum interview, not much to remember. But he made one point I will never forget. “Doesn’t matter how much the city’s economy grows,” he said, using his hands to make a widening circle. “If there’s any contraction,” he said, bringing his hands closer together, “no matter what, it’s going to hurt like hell.”
No truer words have ever been said. Which is why most of us are mystified by the non-negotiable, end-of-fossil-fuel stance espoused by many in our midst. These environmental “progressives” are willing to risk a major drop in Alberta’s standard of living by ending our major industry … no matter how minimal its contribution to global warming may be.
Here we are, celebrating 50 years since the opening of the first commercial oilsands mine in Fort McMurray. The Sun’s excellent six-part series on the oilsan ...
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Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Finance Minister Bill Morneau are learning the hard way.
Do not upset the little ol’ ladies.
In one of the most remarkable missteps of modern Canadian politics, even the little ol’ ladies are spitting mad at this government’s proposed tax reforms.
Ninety-two-year-old Nancy Power, an active (and powerful) federal Liberal party member all her life, has cancelled her party membership in protest.
A now-retired independent business woman, Nancy used funds generated from investments within her Canadian professional corporation as her retirement fund.
With the proposed tax changes, “they are going to take away 73% of my income,” says Power, “and that’s criminal.”
Justin and Bill have been run over by an unforeseen truck.
They thought they were simply carrying on with the Liberal election promise of helping the middle-class by more fair taxation of the top 1% of Canadian income-earners.
Somebody forgot t ...
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La Ronde Restaurant - Retro Thursday menu,
Chateau Lacombe Hotel,
24th floor, 10111 Bellamy Hill
780-428-6611
Chateaulacombe.com
Tuesday to Saturday, 5:30 p.m. to 11 p.m.
Sunday, 10:30 a.m. to 2 p.m., 5:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.
Closed Mondays
(Retro-Thursday menu available Thursdays only.)
Three-course Retro-Thursday dinner for two, excluding tip and beverages: $132
Food: 4 of 5 Suns
Ambience: 4.5 of 5 Suns
Service: 4.5 of 5 Suns
It’s a fun idea and timely too.
For the last few months, Edmonton’s No.1 viewpoint restaurant La Ronde at the top of the Chateau Lacombe Hotel has featured a Retro Thursday three-course menu.
On Wednesday, September 27, 2017, the Chateau Lacombe will celebrate its 50th anniversary. When the hotel’s doors opened in 1967, it was considered the best thing in Edmonton since sliced bread.
If you’d been a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed teenager taken by your family to dine at the swanky revolving La Ronde that first year, you m ...
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Family-owned-and-operated companies can be happy, healthy places moving nimbly around the feet of staid, mega-sized publicly-traded corporations.
For 75 years and three generations, the Pechet family’s Stagewest Hospitality has played and prospered in Alberta.
From hotels to restaurants, dinner theatres, casinos, land development, First Nation partnerships, travel agents and now a British Columbia winery, Stagewest has happily danced from hospitality opportunity to opportunity, buying at the bottom, selling at the top.
No Pechets, however, currently live in Edmonton. Stagewest Hospitality’s third-generation CEO and President Jason Pechet is based in Calgary. Second-generation Howard Pechet, now semi-retired, has lived in San Diego but done business in Alberta since 1989. He moved his family to that city after Stagewest Hospitality’s flagship Mayfield Inn was sold to Alberta lumber baron Al Owen.
Stagewest owns the Violino Gastronomia Italiana restaurant here, plus Mayfield Travel ...
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A few small business/money related stories, each capable of being much bigger...
OILSANDS RE-TOOLING
Operating and capital costs in the oilsands have been reduced by a most impressive 30% since the Great Oil Price Crash of 2014, thanks to full-press utilization of cleaner, greener, safer, faster, cheaper technologies, plus more productivity per worker and wages coming back down to earth.
How ironic that low oil prices have spurred these innovations, as beneficial to the environment as they are to the economy. Innovation was slow as molasses during the oilsands’ pre-2014 glory years – why look for efficiencies when there was so money to be made?
The current slow recovery of the Alberta economy is likely more about the retooling within the non-renewable energy sector (and the re-building of Fort McMurray after last year’s fire) than any other business.
But more bad news for oilsands labour is coming. As is happening in mining operations the world over, within two to three years, ...
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