Calgary’s Business publisher Doug Firby recently sat down with Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi to talk about the business climate in the city, known as the oil and gas capital of Canada. This is Part 1 of a three-part series. You can listen to podcasts of the exclusive interview below.
Those business leaders who are holding out for an energy-driven recovery need to accept that the business climate has changed “radically” and start thinking about how to build a more resilient economy, says Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi.
The mayor says many Calgarians have concluded that this recovery is going to look different but “not everyone’s figured it out.”
“There are many voices that say, ‘Let’s do what we used to.’ It’s very clear that the solutions that worked in the past aren’t going to work now. We’ve got to get our heads around what a more resilient economy looks like.”
In an exclusive interview with Calgary’s Business, Nenshi says shifts in thinking have taken place in our community, “but I would argue that there is a sector of the business community that has been resistant to change and wishes things could go back the way they were.
“And I think we would all love it if it did but we have to ready if they don’t.”
Nenshi says his comments should not be construed as a lack of support for the energy sector. “I’ve been a loud and passionate advocate for market access since I started in this job,” he said. “I think we will get pipelines built.”
Nenshi’s comments came during an interview on Calgary’s business climate. He noted that the adversity of recent months has actually created opportunities, such as a supply of affordable office space in the downtown core.
“You know, before, small and medium-sized businesses just couldn’t come downtown. Too expensive. Too hard to get space. And so now we want to help companies think ‘I could be a downtown company,’ with access to markets and customers and all that that means.”
One of the tools to encourage the transition is the city’s $100-million Opportunity Investment Fund, Nenshi says. It’s modelled after other cities undergoing economic dislocation and in particular Kitchener-Waterloo, Ont., which experienced a series of setbacks, including BlackBerry’s decline as a local employer. The city government, University of Waterloo and the private sector worked together, and “they actually created one of the most vibrant economies in Canada.”
Calgary’s fund, he said, is meant to be both seed capital and a way to smooth bumps in the road for prospective businesses. For example, he said, the fund could be drawn on to install something as a simple as a traffic light to ensure a new warehouse has improved access to a proposed location.
In spite of the economic doldrums, Nenshi said he’s struck by the fact that Calgary has remained a talent attractor.
“That’s been the most interesting thing about this recession,” he says. “Folks used to say … I think Rick Bell called it the U-Haul Index, closely correlated to the price of oil. The price of oil went up, the U-Hauls came in; the price of oil went down, they left Calgary.
“And we didn’t see that now.”
Conceding there was a “teensy bit” of out-migration, the mayor said people are staying and finding entrepreneurial things to do. “It’s a mind-shift we’re really starting to make, so I’m less worried about brain drain and more worried about creating great opportunities for our highly skilled workforce.”
Calgary once offered a lifetime employment track for engineers, he said, “where you know, I graduate from university, I get a job at Shell, I become a reservoir engineer and that’s how I think of myself. And then when I get laid off from Shell, I look for a job as a reservoir engineer.”
These individuals are now thinking of themselves as highly-trained scientists who have the ability to work in a broad range of sectors, such as clean energy.
The mayor also said the city learned valuable lessons from its unsuccessful bid for Amazon’s HQ2.
“One of the things we really learned in the Amazon bid was we brought the community together in a way. To talk about the community in a way we’ve never really done before. And in so doing, we not only found hidden weaknesses but also hidden strengths.”
Nenshi said the collateral material and research done for the Amazon bid has been “super helpful” in pitches to other companies considering Calgary as a business home.
One has to do with the specific education of our workforce. Nenshi said that although we have a highly-trained workforce, “the skill sets that we trained for are not exactly the skill sets that particularly big companies are looking for.”
He noted there’s no profession called software engineer but people can be trained to those jobs quickly.
“The Alberta government has pledged some funding for that and our challenge is to make sure that funding is deployed for those thousands of positions in the smartest possible way.”
On Tuesday, in Part 2, the mayor talks about his efforts to reduce red tape at City Hall.
Veteran journalist Doug Firby is publisher of Calgary’s Business and Troy Media and president of Troy Media Digital Solutions.
The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.
