Category: Hicks on Biz columns from The Edmonton Sun
Hicks on Biz columns from The Edmonton Sun
What is there about Edmonton, Alberta, Canada that represents the best of Canada, North America or world-class?
Here's the start of a list below.
If you'd like to add to it, please e-mail me at graham.hicks@hicksbiz.com or Facebook (Graham Hicks) or add a comment.If you have the source of your statistic, please include it.
I'd like to make this the "go-to" list for Edmonton's points of pride.
Last updated, April 27, 2013
PCL Construction, Canada’s largest construction company and sixth in North America, is headquartered here.
Stantec is a Canadian architecture, design and engineering giant, closing in on its goal of being in the top 10 North American construction service firms.
North American’s second largest energy park is Leduc-Nisku with 4,650 acres and another 3,000 acres in reserve by the airport. Its 600 companies are leaders in adaptive technology for oil extraction. Three-quarters of them sell internationally.
The deep bitumen extraction technology of choice, Steam Assisted ...
Read the rest of entry »
BY GRAHAM HICKS ,EDMONTON SUN
Wave goodbye to the bitumen upgrader.
Hold a funeral for the giant “pre-refineries” that, until 10 years ago, were still expected to dot Alberta’s Industrial Heartland around Fort Saskatchewan, each employing thousands of construction workers for years on end, each pumping $7 billion or more into the Alberta economy.
Upgraders are so dead that oilsands giant Suncor has walked away from a staggering $3 billion – that’s 3,000 million dollars – it had already invested in its on-site Voyageur upgrader. Suncor officially cancelled the project last week.
New Suncor President Steve Williams couldn’t justify spending the additional $7 billion needed to complete the upgrader, not with better “opportunity costs” elsewhere in the oilsands, i.e. using the $7 billion to expand bitumen production.
Upgraders made sense right up to the building of Shell’s Scotford complex in the late ‘90s.
Running molasses-like b ...
Read the rest of entry »
“Make Something Edmonton” works as an Edmonton slogan.It may be generic, but it keys in on the essence of Edmonton.We do make things happen in this city and region. (References to "Edmonton" in this column means "Greater Edmonton." We're all in this together.)As slogan originator Todd Babiak points out, there’s no aristocracy here. We’re not glamorous, but we’re not phony. An urban “barn-building” culture means we get things done.The trick will be to spread the “Make Something Edmonton” expression beyond the downtown artisan community, to make the attitude expressed in that slogan a point of pride in the entire business community.Make Something Edmonton isn’t wishful thinking. It's reality.The git-‘er-done attitude and accomplishments of our entrepreneurs over the past decade has been remarkable. And in researching the “git-‘er-done” success of Edmonton, surprises have emerged.Mayor Steve Mandel has brought all the players onto the same page and pointing in the same direction. Before his watch, we squabbled e ...
Read the rest of entry »
We still don’t know how it all started.But we do know.Most of us have driven through white-outs, knuckles as white as the pelting snow, intensely aware that the slightest mistake on the steering wheel could send our vehicle caroming out of control with just a few thin strips of metal between us and eternity.In our imaginations, a massive ghost truck looms out the whiteness.There’s nowhere to go but straight into its headlights.RCMP still truly don’t know how it all started at about 11:30 a.m. on Thursday, March 21, not until every collision report is complete and every driver and passenger interviewed.On the Queen Elizabeth II Highway, 20 kilometres south of Leduc, 50 kilometres north of Ponoka, just past a rise, in the midst of a white-out, heading north, one vehicle must have collided with another.Vehicle after vehicle came over that rise, sliding helplessly into other vehicles – sedans, SUVs, pick-ups, bigger trucks, tractor-trailers, fuel-tankers, buses, cattle-liners.The lucky ones, about half of the 85 ...
Read the rest of entry »
A few weeks ago, every mad dog in that online kennel known as the Hicks on Biz comment section was taking a chunk out of my sorry rear for the suggestion, the mere suggestion, that Alberta Premier Alison Redford was a pretty smart political cookie.Well, after that provincial 2013/14 budget announced on March 7, I apologize.The mad dogs were right.Her fiscal course for the coming year was politically expedient, but not what was right for Alberta.Redford took the easy way out.The 2013/14 budget was a watershed.Redford and her Conservative government could have introduced new taxes and at the same time kick-started the Heritage Fund.She had the perfect storm. The Alberta public was ready to accept short-term pain for long-term gain.Martha and Henry, Ralph Klein’s “severely normal” Albertans, have finally realized we can’t spend every penny of oil royalties and never save for tomorrow. With minimal new taxes and much the same spending, Redford could then have diverted 30% of oil revenues into savings, as envision ...
Read the rest of entry »
Curling is Canada's most peculiar sport.The Tim Hortons Brier, entering into its final playoffs and championship games Saturday and Sunday at Rexall Place, is expected to sell at least 200,000 tickets.It will have been televised its entire eight-day run, on Canada's most watched sports network, TSN.The Brier, says Canadian Curling Association events director Warren Hansen, will cost $3 million to $4 million to produce.It will earn, from ticket sales and sponsorship/TV revenue (including government incentives) $4 million to $5 million.Most sports with such a big audience, as a rule of thumb, split net revenues on a 50-50 basis with its performers, i.e. the athletes.But the Brier will spend just $500,000 on the 12 teams. It will cover all their expenses, and provide prize money for the winning teams.That's 10% of net revenues in this case, not 50% as in other major professional sports.Curlers, even at the Brier level, are not fully professional. The sport is an income-producing hobby. "In a good year," says for ...
Read the rest of entry »
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 »