How strong is the economy Canada’s Mark Carney leaves behind? | Business | The Observer

Bob Robinson, the good-natured, broad-shouldered boss of Calgary construction firm Westcor, says: “If you can’t get a job in this city, you’re not trying.”

Calgary is the Houston of Canada: a fast-growing city with a frontier atmosphere. The skyline is punctuated by glass and steel skyscrapers in which oil and gas executives plan multibillion-dollar investments against the distant backdrop of the snow-capped Rocky Mountains, while the eight-lane highways outside are clogged with oversized pick-up trucks.

The oil and gas fields are many miles to the north, around Fort McMurray, but much of the money is made and spent here. The carefree boom times in the runup to 2007 were swept away by the financial crisis; but the continued thirst of emerging economies such as China for natural resources has helped to prop up world prices and new technology has opened up previously unreachable reserves in tar sands –highly controversial among environmental campaigners.

So while much of the rest of the world remains mired in economic slump, in Calgary business is looking up.

via How strong is the economy Canada’s Mark Carney leaves behind? | Business | The Observer.