who doesnt love summer
i found this in the newspaper:
Brace yourselves, best of boom still to come
Murray Lyons, The StarPhoenix
Published: Friday, December 28, 2007
couple of weeks ago, Greg Yuel of PIC Investments Ltd. was the keynote speaker at a Yuletide business luncheon in support of Junior Achievement, an annual event now sponsored by the chamber.
Or to be more formal, it was an event sponsored by the Greater Saskatoon Chamber of Commerce. More on that later.
Yuel, having taken over relatively recently as president and CEO of the family-held industrial conglomerate, does his father Jim proud in a number of areas, including being a plain speaker.
And what I mean by that is Yuel the younger did not "dumb down" a speech, just because there was a high school student at every table among the business crowd. Rather, it was refreshing to hear somebody speak about business and entrepreneurship without "synergistic" business jargon.
In an era when parents over-manage their kids' activities, it was nice to hear Yuel recall fondly the early days of his parents' move into entrepreneurship when he and his sister would play hide-and-seek in the warehouse on Saturdays while his parents caught up on orders. Nowadays, somebody would probably phone the Workers Compensation Board or child and family services if they heard about that.
No doubt there will be more than one Junior Achiever taking Yuel's enthusiasm to heart and starting a business for themselves sometime in the next decade.
And what a decade it could be.
Yuel's message to the business crowd and the young achievers was that we may have thought we were already in a boom, but people in Saskatchewan don't know what a boom is -- the boom is still to come.
To get perspective on what he meant, it makes sense to look back to see the future.
Kent Smith-Windsor of the chamber likens the era we are entering now to another time in the city's history when Saskatoon saw pedal-to-the-metal growth.
In 1961, the city's population was 95,526. In itself, that was an impressive doubling from the post-war (1946) figure of 46,028. In the next decade, however, Saskatoon would see growth and investment decisions that helped create the city we see today. In the 10 years leading to 1971, the population grew to 126,450, a rise of 32 per cent in one decade.
It was the era in which Saskatoon's greatest mayor, Sid Buckwold, helped bring a concert hall to the downtown, moved the rail yards out of the heart of the city and helped lure the retail investment that is Midtown Plaza -- still the reason why Saskatoon has a fairly vibrant downtown that can survive big boxes in the suburbs.
What drove the growth 45 years ago was a combination of things. First, there was the emergence of the potash industry in nearby central Saskatchewan. Wheat, the crop that built Saskatchewan, was enjoying one of its rare heydays as the government backed massive sales to Russia and China. The oil industry activity to the west in the Kindersley area brought some work to the city's then-developing machining industry.
No wonder the city adopted the now quaint-sounding "P.O.W. City" marketing moniker to push the Potash-Oil-Wheat connection. (You will note uranium wasn't really on the city's radar in the 1960s
Fast forward to today and a similar resource boom is taking place. There are so many potential resource plays underlying our recent economic expansion that trying to fit all the words into a new acronym -- potash, uranium, diamonds, heavy oil, bitumen and (surprisingly) wheat -- is a wordsmith's nightmare.
Amid all the resource growth, pure-knowledge companies are also emerging and surviving like VCom Inc., riding the world's boom in broadband communications.
If the original resource boom of the 1960s is duplicated and 30 per cent growth is in the cards, the city's population could be anywhere from 250,000 people to 275,000 people depending on whether you pick the middle of the next decade or 2021
And who knows how big the metropolitan census area of Saskatoon will be? It could be 300,000 to 350,000 when one includes all the towns that used to be tiny farm service centres and are now growing bedroom communities such as Osler, Martensville and Warman -- not to mention Aberdeen, which some are saying could be the next Martensville.
One of the reasons Smith-Windsor urged his chamber board a few years back to rename itself to Greater Saskatoon Chamber of Commerce was to embrace the idea that Saskatoon is a larger regional entity. He argues wisely that it would not be a good thing if Saskatoon and the towns nearby become a smaller version of Edmonton where people from the big city and the satellite towns don't always work in unison.
In the meantime, Greg Yuel's message to a combined audience of businesspeople and the next generation of businesspeople is a timely one. We could be on the cusp of an historic growth era.
To paraphrase Yuel, we all need to be "smart enough to embrace" the coming boom.
Prev
Linear Mode
