Category: Hicks on Biz columns from The Edmonton Sun
Hicks on Biz columns from The Edmonton Sun
You might read this column with skepticism, arms folded, chin tucked, frown lines creasing your forehead.
If you’re an investor, the golden rules of investing were long ago hammered into your brain.
The first three: Don’t lose money, don’t lose money, don’t lose money.
Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Keep most of your money in boring safe investments. If you can’t afford to lose it, don’t go near the risky stuff. If the investment looks too good to be true, it is too good to be true. Finally, refer to the first three rules.
So why should we care about an estimated 26,000 Albertans who invested in, and then lost, at least $2.1 billion in dozens of intrinsically high-risk, mostly real-estate, investments, sold within the Alberta Securities Commission regulatory umbrella as “exempt” financial products?
Because, says Don Logan of the Alberta Investors Protection group, there’s a world of difference between a poor investmen ...
Read the rest of entry »
He’s mad! He’s mad!
This Hicks on Biz chap has gone clear off his rocker!
He is suggesting Alison Redford is smart!
Super smart! A superb politician!
I am indeed.
It’s fashionable these days to verbally pound Alberta’s premier at every turn.
In Wednesday’s Edmonton Sun, four columns, one editorial and one news story were all over Redford and Finance Minister Doug Horner for not anticipating a huge drop in energy royalty revenues, a drop creating $4 billion government revenue shortfalls for the current and next fiscal years.
You read it here first.
By the time Redford heads into the next election, likely April 2016, she could have a balanced budget, no provincial debt, and a start on building the Heritage Fund ($16 billion) to the size of Alaska’s Permanent Fund (now at $41 billion).
Why am I not a madman?
The current free fall in government revenue is all about the “bitumen bubble,” the massive discount on the pr ...
Read the rest of entry »
It’s Greater Edmonton’s invisible industrial giant.The Acheson Industrial Area runs from the city's western boundary (231 St.) almost to Spruce Grove, from south of Hwy 16A all the way north to Hwy 16. That's a space bigger than Mill Woods.Ten thousand acres, 260 companies, 5,400 employees, a natural area, and even a residential acreage sub-division in its heart.Everybody’s heard of Alberta’s Industrial Heartland, 144,000 acres fanning out from Fort Saskatchewan with 6,100 employees working at 40 monstrous oil, natural gas and petrochemical processing plants.Who doesn’t know the Nisku Business Park, next door to Leduc? It's the second biggest “energy park” in North America after Houston, Texas, with 8,000 acres, 600 oilfield-related companies, 8,000 to 10,000 on-site workers.Edmonton itself has some 13,000 acres of industrial land - mostly in the northwest, east/southeast, and central south alongside Gateway Boulevard. It's chopped up into bits and pieces. No one industrial area dominates the city landscape.B ...
Read the rest of entry »
We take so much for granted.
Most urban regions would kill to have an industrial “park” like Alberta’s Industrial Heartland.
Canada’s largest petro-chemical and hydrocarbon (oil and natural gas) processing region embraces 582 square kilometres of land covering five municipalities around Fort Saskatchewan, including the still-virgin Edmonton Energy and Technology Park within Edmonton’s northeastern boundaries.
Some 40 companies produce products made from oilsand and natural gas feed stocks. It’s all about keeping the jobs and the knowledge and the downstream wealth creation from the raw bitumen, crude oil and natural gas of northern Alberta in Alberta, for Albertans.
At least half those companies work at global levels with an estimated $30 billion of investment as of 2012, 7,000 knowledge-based jobs and $77 million a year in municipal taxes alone.
Intermunicipal squabbling is usually a quicksand in which regional economic development plans are swallo ...
Read the rest of entry »
So what about this "differential" or $50 gap difference between the price of crude in the Excited States, and the price of our heavy oil?It’s quite simple. Most of our “Canadian Select Crude” is exported to heavy-oil refineries in the American mid-west or all the way to the Louisiana coast.Number one, the pipelines to Louisiana, where huge refineries pay $100 a barrel for Mexican heavy oil that arrives by boat, are so full that heavy oil is backing up through the system. The storage “tank farms” east of Edmonton are just about full.Everybody knew a pipeline capacity crunch was coming, especially with delayed construction of the mighty Keystone XL pipeline from here to Louisiana. But the crunch has happened much earlier and with more ferocity than was expected.Number two, the mid-west refineries are running at full capacity.Number three, our oil now competes for mid-west refinery and pipeline space with new American crude oil from North Dakota.Which means, since early December, the price of our ultra-heavy oil ...
Read the rest of entry »
How does a ski resort make any money?Marmot Basin in Jasper is weather dependent, yet the bills have to be paid no matter how many skiers are on the hill.It's labour intensive.Capital re-investment is a must, if only to meet customer expectations. New ski lifts can cost up to $8 million a pop.Other than holidays, it's about weekends, for five months of the year.Ninety per cent of Marmot Basin's skiers (including snowboarders) come from Edmonton and northern Alberta. If it's -20C with slippery roads, only the diehards will show up. Jasper's best day ever was 5,007 skiers. Its every-day average would be an estimated 1,500 skiers.Being in a national park, Marmot has stringent environmental standards. There are no on-site chalet real-estate plays as Parks Canada owns the land. Marmot is not allowed to open in summer.A day's lift pass costs $80. But discounts abound, i.e. Jasper-in-January festival ski packages, running until Jan. 27. The average lift ticket price works out to $45 to $50.Marmot Basin is a private ...
Read the rest of entry »
Cassios Italian Restaurant,
602 Connaught Drive, Jasper (Whistler’s Inn)
(780) 852-4070
www.cassios.ca
——
Food: 4 of 5 stars
Ambiance: 4 of 5 stars
Service: 4 of 5 stars
Dinner for two (without beverages): Basic, $60; fully loaded, $90
——
As January locks its icy fingers around our souls, there is but one antidote.
Jasper in January. The two-week winter festival in Edmonton’s favourite holiday town runs until January 27.
Jasper in January is all about skiing by day, eating by night.
Cassios Italian Restaurant is in the heart of Jasper, in Whistler’s Inn. It’s seven years old, opened by Michael and Anna Cassios shortly after Michael retired as the general manager of Jasper’s Sawridge Hotel. Assisted by head chef Kevin St. Louis, Cassios has built a reputation for friendly, professional service and excellent Italian food.
One does enter Cassios in a fine mood, with the pleasant afterglow that comes after a day of skiing, ...
Read the rest of entry »
There are many popular myths out there about fat-cat Alberta.They are all true.We do pay less income and consumption taxes than any other large Canadian province.Our government does spend more (per-capita) than any other large province, besides debt-riddled Quebec.Our doctors, nurses and teachers are the best paid in the country, especially considering taxes, expenses and living costs.We are hopelessly addicted to non-renewable royalties, so addicted that it wouldn’t matter how damning the environmental consequences, oilsands expansion must continue.The consequences: We are living in a fool’s paradise. We have squandered our oil/gas/coal royalty wealth by living for today, not saving for tomorrow. Despite an income gusher that no other province has, our provincial government is still about to plunge into debt.Increased provincial income or consumption taxes, along with reining in public sector, health care and education labour costs, is the only prudent, fiscally sound path to a solid future for our kids.But ...
Read the rest of entry »
The crystal ball doesn’t really need any polishing, because rarely have the opportunities/challenges for Edmonton’s and northern Alberta’s economy been so clear.It’s about extracting and shipping hydrocarbons (oil, natural gas and coal) in a way that keeps the forests green, the water pure, the air pristine, the pipelines and transmission lines as unobtrusive as possible.It’s about compromise, because millions of barrels of oil a day squeezed out of vast sand deposits to our north can’t be done without some disruption to Mother Earth. It’s a question of how much, and how the land is left once the mining is done.It’s about a Goldilocks economy. Not too hot, not too cold, trusting that a combination of market forces and government regulation keeps the energy juggernaut at just the right temperature.Pipelines are on the top of every agenda: Before, building pipelines to get our oil and gas out to the teeming masses of Asia or the thirsty refineries of Louisiana was rather abstract, an issue years away as the oil ...
Read the rest of entry »
Last week, the Katz Group reviewed its downtown development vision around the new, still-stalled, downtown arena proposal for city council.To recap: Two office towers, two condo towers, a new hotel and up so six "low-rise" residential and commercial development surrounding the arena in a well-planned urban precinct.But the same darned question ran through everybody's mind, at least anybody with any long-term connection to Edmonton's downtown.Sounds great, but what about demand?Since the great downtown office building boom of 1976 to 1983 (TD Tower, Oxford Tower, Manulife Place, Bell Tower, Canadian Western Bank Place, Scotia Place, Sun Life and the Enbridge Tower), Edmonton had/has been awash in office space.Only three office towers have been built since 1983. Two of them - Canada Place and Commerce Place - were more about government stimulus than supply and demand.The EPCOR "Tower of Power" opened in 2011. It's the first "free-market" new office tower in almost 30 years.There hasn't been a major new hotel bu ...
Read the rest of entry »