[Dkeirle]

That seems very defeatist to me, while I understand why people here may feel that way, you can be behind 3-0 and still come back. You only lose when or if you give up.

I don't see it as defeatist, it's only being realistic. A team can always come back from a 3-0 deficit because they are in the game and can control their destiny. The issue here is that YEG's destiny is controlled by externally factors. Essentially AC and WS and the business feasibility of their flights. This isn't to say YEG won't get a flight to a destination like London someday, they will, but it's going to be limited beyond that. We'll see when WS's new dreamliners arrive, they'll have 7 more. I'm confident they'll add London, and who knows maybe another Euro destination.

 

[Offworld]

Edmonton has generally been run by socialists and unionists for the past 50 years who are not the most business friendly - Edmonton is generally a union town with "progressives" - Calgary has generally been run for the past 50 years by dynamic business focused people who embrace capitalism and corporate culture. This means Calgary has become a wealthier, more famous, more organized, more pragmatic business city with a real airport. Edmonton has people like Andrew Knack and Heather "Hamas" McPherson representing it - and therefore we get a bush league airport and a drug riddled downtown and massive socialist housing complexes destroying our legacy neighborhoods - or "areas of white privelage" as the progressive set call them. Same as it ever was.

I can add to that. Calgary has effectively marketed itself as the gateway to the world. Edmonton? The gateway to the north. Walk downtown and see that play out real time.

 

[Dkeirle]

Maybe you avoided the inevitable, or maybe not. Calgary having all those head office jobs allowed Calgary to build a larger skilled labor pool, and it's been a big help in Calgary's evolution towards being a different city. According to your post Calgary has lost thousands of oil and gas jobs, and it's probably true. This is exactly what Calgarians want to see. If these jobs were killing our economy it would be a different story, instead Calgary's workforce has grown by 160,000 in the past 5 years, and the city has grown by 300,00. Even more striking is that the city's tech workforce has doubled from 30,000 to 60,000. Making it one of the fastest growing in NA the past 5 years. And, yes, tech jobs, and no, they aren't call centre jobs.

North American Rank	City	Number of Workers	Employment Growth 2021-2024
3	Toronto	334,200	14.7%
7	Kitchener Waterloo	39,400	58.2%
10	Vancouver	125,100	5.2%
11	Ottawa	95,900	13.2%
15	Montreal	154,900	6.9%
17	Calgary	64,600	61.1%
43	Edmonton	32,300	-1.2%
Unranked	Winnipeg	21,000	10%

Not to nitpick, but the math isn't quite right. An increase of 30k to 60k is a 100% increase, but the chart says 61.1%. Where are the numbers and percentages coming from?

 

[Beltline_B]

Not to nitpick, but the math isn't quite right. An increase of 30k to 60k is a 100% increase, but the chart says 61.1%. Where are the numbers and percentages coming from?

You're correct. I'm not sure where the 30,000 to 60,000 numbers came from. For Calgary it's now 64K and up 61% from whatever it was before. The source is from a report by CBRE

 

[Yeggy]

There are very real municipal and surrounding structural differences between Edm and Calgary that put us at a disadvantage. Starting in the 80’s when the province undercut our industrial tax base and gave it to a hamlet of (now) 75,000 people. Who in turn used it to surround large parts of Edmonton with “Acreage Estates” that pay rock bottom taxes. Not only that, thes communities then also needed their own preforming arts centres, and other such amenities that are all centralized in Calgary.

Meanwhile Calgary was allowed to expropriate numerous neighbouring communities and was given nearly everything they requested whilst we were denied and given unsolicited land in the NE

 

[Beltline_B]

Not so fast. At one time Imperial, oil Shell, Syncrude, Suncor among others had their regional offices in Edmonton until Lougheed asked (told) them to move along with all of the regulatory departments. Edmontonians were indeed to blame for going along with this and continually going along with it and voting conservative for the next 40 years.

Not so fast. I get that the PC/UCP has not been kind to Edmonton over the years, but some things need to be cleared up.
- Suncor never had its head office in Edmonton. It's always been in Calgary. When it was the Great Canadian Oil Sands, it might have been based in Edmonton, but when they partnered with Sun Oil, which was already Calgary based maybe they moved it then? Either way was nothing to do with Lougheed.
- Syncrude has only ever had a small head office in Calgary with a handful of executives. The vast majority of employees were always in FM, and Edmonton had a fair amount as well, with a research centre off 23rd ave, and another office in downtown Edmonton. Some office type jobs (mainly IT) were moved to Calgary about 15 years ago at Imperial's request. After Suncor took a larger role they moved some jobs as well, but a lot of those jobs have moved back and forth between Calgary and FM at different times.
- Shell did indeed move their head office to Calgary, but was nothing to do with Lougheed. They moved about 450 employees to Calgary which already had over 1,000 employees in the Shell Tower in order to consolidate operations.
- Imperial Oil was based in Toronto and moved their head office to Calgary.

As per why all the oil companies HQs ended up in Calgary, it's more to do with one small office building that was built on spec in 1951, than anything done by Peter Lougheed.

Lougheed bought PWA with the explicit purpose of moving the head office from Vancouver and the centre of opposition from Edmonton to Calgary to make them the hub they are today.

Maybe Lougheed did some backroom deals to make Calgary the PWA hub, it wouldn't surprise me. I don't believe that is the reason YYC is as big a hub as it is. YYC is the hub it is today because it's always had the steady year round tourist traffic, and strong business traffic. The large scale airport completed in 1977 was already planned as a large airport before the government purchased PWA. Westjet's success has made it into a larger than expected hub, but it's also due to big increases in global passenger traffic, and Banff being on people's radar.

 

[Yeggy]

^ Please keep in mind that the province moved many of the o/g government departments to Calgary, the was done by Lougheed. The province has influenced many many business decisionsin this province. In my life time there has been one Premier who has fully invested in Edmonton and that was Stelmach. He was great for this city.

There have been numerous years where Edmonton grew faster than Calgary. Until the recent population explosion pur CMA’s were only 80k apart. Even now they are only 150ish apart.

Edmonton remains one of the fastest growing cities in North America. Our future is bright

 

[Vanfan123]

I think we’re getting distracted on the talk of hubs. The goal shouldn’t be to turn YEG into a hub. That’s not happening for valid reasons. We should focus on getting a select few key routes across the oceans (London, Frankfurt, one major airport in Asia) (and the US Northeast Corridor eventually) that’ll allow us to reach 90% of the major airports of the world in one stop or less. That won’t make us a major hub, but it will make us significantly more attractive to businesses and tourism. Like I said before, the bare minimum for a city of our size and wealth.

The benchmark for us shouldn’t be YYC (unrealistic) but rather YOW. They’re also the same size as us but less wealthy, get 60% of our passenger traffic, even further from the mountains and are closer to bigger hub airports that hinder Ottawa’s ability to attract more flights. Despite this, they have 3 transatlantic flights (2 to London, 1 to Paris). And sure, they’re closer to Europe, but they’re not running small aircraft to Paris - those are Dreamliners. Plus, more efficient aircraft like the A321 XLR are coming out that make range a non-factor for us to Europe. 2 frequent transatlantic and a transpacific flight are achievable and our airport needs to lobby hard for that.

The reason Ottawa (YOW) has more international flights compared to Edmonton YEG - “is that (PD) Porter is slowly building YOW into a Fortress Hub in Eastern Canada ” with more Domestic/ US & International frequencies + new additions the last few years & ! Currently Porter has about 30+ destinations nonstop.

Plus it’s the capital city of Canada & enough tourism/ (some) business demand.

 

[Payd1964]

I think we’re getting distracted on the talk of hubs. The goal shouldn’t be to turn YEG into a hub. That’s not happening for valid reasons. We should focus on getting a select few key routes across the oceans (London, Frankfurt, one major airport in Asia) (and the US Northeast Corridor eventually) that’ll allow us to reach 90% of the major airports of the world in one stop or less. That won’t make us a major hub, but it will make us significantly more attractive to businesses and tourism. Like I said before, the bare minimum for a city of our size and wealth.

The benchmark for us shouldn’t be YYC (unrealistic) but rather YOW. They’re also the same size as us but less wealthy, get 60% of our passenger traffic, even further from the mountains and are closer to bigger hub airports that hinder Ottawa’s ability to attract more flights. Despite this, they have 3 transatlantic flights (2 to London, 1 to Paris). And sure, they’re closer to Europe, but they’re not running small aircraft to Paris - those are Dreamliners. Plus, more efficient aircraft like the A321 XLR are coming out that make range a non-factor for us to Europe. 2 frequent transatlantic and a transpacific flight are achievable and our airport needs to lobby hard for that.

Correct regarding people wanting one stop to destinations around the world. And before the YYC crowd attacks, this means actually flying more than 40 minutes on your first leg and not having a 3+ hour layover for your second flight. Ottawa's airport is really quiet, doesn't even have flights 24/7, and yet you look at their destination board and they have lots of selection to transborder and international destinations. I think most Edmontonians would be ecstatic with year round flights to the following transborder cities, being SEA, SFO, LAX, DEN, IAH, MSP, ORD and dare to dream EWR (or other New York) with US carriers. And international we can only realistically hope for year round daily service to AMS, though it would be nice to have additional year round service to another european City and year round service to a destination in Asia. The key factor is getting year round service so that you can count on the flights being there.

 

[Oilers99]

All we need is daily service to major connector hub airports as follows and we’re good:

Delta:
Seattle (ideally 2x)
SLC (ideally 2x)
Atlanta
Minneapolis (ideally 2x)
New York (unlikely)

United:
Houston (ideally 2x)
Chicago (ideally 2x)
Denver (already twice)

Europe:
London (AC)
Amsterdam (KLM)

If we could get a make up of the above, we don’t need much else. Everything else would be a bonus (in addition to the standard American cities edmontonians travel to a lot ie. PSP, LA, Phoenix).

 

[Beltline_B]

^ Please keep in mind that the province moved many of the o/g government departments to Calgary, the was done by Lougheed. The province has influenced many many business decisionsin this province. In my life time there has been one Premier who has fully invested in Edmonton and that was Stelmach. He was great for this city.

That's fair. I don't doubt that over the years Calgary has benefitted from the PCs, but I find that Edmontonians often blame all of Calgary's success on the PCs. Sometimes it's attributed to the PCs, but it was the right move. For example in the 90's the Klein government privatized some government functions, and it was advantageous to Calgary. I was involved in Alberta registries being privatized (yes, I'm that old ) The computing side of it was bid on from various companies, but was mostly a two way bidding battle from companies based in Calgary. The company that won the bid, did all of the existing backend support for the registries and handled all of the extra support needed for the privatized branches that were coming online, and they did it for half of the cost of what the government employees were doing it for. At the time a lot of the Edmonton based provincial employees were blaming it on political favoritism, but in the end, it was also the move that made the most sense.
Politics happen. Mostly it seems to have benefitted Calgary, but things go the other way too. I remember Getty moving Alberta Film commission employees from Calgary to Edmonton. The film commission was based in Edmonton but at one point most people worked out of Calgary. The move was a small amount of people, but seemed to be a political one.

There have been numerous years where Edmonton grew faster than Calgary. Until the recent population explosion pur CMA’s were only 80k apart. Even now they are only 150ish apart.

True. Calgary hasn't always grown faster than Edmonton but I can only find three years in the past 38 years that Edmonton grew faster than Calgary (2016, 2017, 2018) Those years make sense, as the oil industry was crashing hard at that time and there were thousands of layoffs.
Historically, Calgary really took off in 1989 and has been on a long steady trajectory. In 1986 Edmonton was 125K larger than Calgary (792K to 636K), but things had flipped by 1999 when Calgary took the lead. Most of the years from 2000 to 2014 the two cities had fairly similar growth with Calgary often edging Edmonton by only a few thousand people.

Edmonton remains one of the fastest growing cities in North America. Our future is bright

Yes, this is true. Personally I think people in Edmonton spend too much time making comparisons to Calgary. Calgary has been a city on steroids for the past 40 years. If you compare Edmonton to other similar sized Canadian or American cities, Edmonton has blown past them.

 

[yeggator]

All we need is daily service to major connector hub airports as follows and we’re good:

Delta:
Seattle (ideally 2x)
SLC (ideally 2x)
Atlanta
Minneapolis (ideally 2x)
New York (unlikely)

United:
Houston (ideally 2x)
Chicago (ideally 2x)
Denver (already twice)

Europe:
London (AC)
Amsterdam (KLM)

If we could get a make up of the above, we don’t need much else. Everything else would be a bonus (in addition to the standard American cities edmontonians travel to a lot ie. PSP, LA, Phoenix).

There we go, a nice focused approach to flight destinations. I would love to see a flight to DC too (but let’s wait till the separatist movement dies down so those assholes don’t use it for secret meetings with US officials to sell out our province)

 

[Gronk!]

I would hold off on adding any more transborder flights for at least another 3 years until the Trump Gong Show is finally over, and add non-stop flights to Cancun, Mexico City, London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Iceland.

 

[The_Cat]

I just hope that separation doesn’t take flight in Alberta. How many flights could Calgary lose?

 

[blue12]

I just hope that separation doesn’t take flight in Alberta. How many flights could Calgary lose?

It's polling at less than 30%. I think it's best we don't speculate about things which don't have a chance at actually happening.