‘It doesn’t actually mean we’re getting richer’: Why a housing boom hasn’t lifted business confidence in Alberta
Alberta’s housing market is booming, with record population growth fueling demand—but business confidence tells a more cautious story.
Alberta Edge host Ryan Hastman speaks with economist Alicia Planincic of the Business Council of Alberta and builder Rohit Gupta of the Rohit Group about what’s driving the province’s housing surge, why Albertans don’t feel any richer, and what it will take for the rest of Canada to feel the benefits of Western growth. The conversation also tackles barriers to interprovincial trade and how Alberta could unlock new economic potential in sectors like AI.
This podcast is generously supported by Don Archibald. The Hub thanks him for his ongoing support.
Program Transcript
This is an automated transcript. Please check against delivery.
RYAN HASTMAN: Alberta’s economy is sending mixed signals. On one hand, we’re topping national growth charts, building homes at twice our pre pandemic pace, and attracting 1000s of newcomers. On the other hand, there are concerning signs investment confidence is shaky. We haven’t gotten back down to those pandemic era mortgage rates. I haven’t heard about any new pipelines or energy corridors getting built, and inflation remains high. Most of all, Albertans just don’t feel any richer. Hello, I’m Ryan Hastman. Today I am recording this from PEI where I am on vacation with my family. On this episode of Alberta edge, we’re asking, what’s holding our economy back, and what would it take for Albertans to feel like we’re back in the good old boom days? Joining me are two guests with a front row seat to Alberta’s economic story. Alicia Planincic is an economist with the Business Council of Alberta. Rohit Gupta is president of the Rohit group, a major builder and innovator based in Edmonton, Alicia. Let’s start with you. Your organisation has its finger on the pulse of the business community. How would you describe the level of business optimism in Alberta right now?
ALICIA PLANINCIC: Yeah, I mean, I’ll start with the ‘what’ blanket that might be obvious, which is that no business is extremely optimistic right now, right anywhere in the world, when you wake up and you don’t know what’s happened in the news, what’s the latest tariff announcement? This is just not a good time to be leading a business and making kind of long term decisions, right? But that said, I think there’s evidence that Alberta businesses are at least a little bit more optimistic than businesses elsewhere in the province, and there are really two reasons behind that. One is just that businesses in Alberta haven’t been as directly affected by tariffs, right? If you think about our biggest export, crude oil, it is flowing to the US tariff free, right? If you think about versus, you know, other places where selling a lot of steel, aluminium, or, you know, the auto industry, Alberta doesn’t really have that issue as much. So it’s been a little bit hasn’t had to deal with tariffs as directly as other businesses elsewhere. But I think the other big reason for more optimism is just the enormous population growth that the province has seen over the last few years. And I mean, the numbers are just, frankly, so astounding. You know, if you think about 400,000 more people over the course of just a few years, that’s basically adding four red deers to the province, right? Like this, these are extraordinary numbers. And so if you look at which businesses are the most optimistic, it’s not that surprising. If you think about what is the first thing you need when you move to Alberta, you need a home, right? And so if you look at the construction industry realtors, they are among the most optimistic industries in Alberta, because they are benefiting from all of that population growth.
RYAN HASTMAN: Right. And maybe the housing builders too. So Rohit, we’ll get to you. But just want to ask one more thing. You know, Alicia, you talked about business confidence. It reminds me of consumer confidence. You know, my wife and I, we’re just regular people, but we’re coming up to some big decisions around mortgage renewals and other things to do, and it’s kind of a scary time. I mean, honestly, don’t know what the next 612, 18 months are going to hold. So if I’m feeling that way, I’m sure the business environment is similar.
ALICIA PLANINCIC: Yeah, and you’re not wrong on the consumer side. And I think a part of it too is just, you know, when you look at those top line numbers of Alberta’s economy, we’re really growing bigger, right? Because we’ve got more people, and the construction is very visible, you know, anywhere in the province, which is great for my toddler that loves an excavator, right? But it doesn’t actually mean that we’re getting richer as individual Albertans. And so I think that’s a thing that’s that’s been true, not just over the last few years, but over the last couple of decades. So where you know individual Burtons probably are facing some real price pressures of just, how do I pay for groceries? Because incomes are just not growing in the way that they once were.
RYAN HASTMAN: Well, Rohit, let’s bring you in on this. So maybe you’ll just want to give listeners a quick overview of the Rohit group and then talk a little bit about what Alicia said and how that connects to what you guys are seeing right now.
ROHIT GUPTA: Yeah, thanks a lot, Ryan. So growth group, we’re a builder developer based out of Edmonton. We operate in Edmonton, Calgary, Saskatoon, Regina and Ottawa. And we built, do some land development, home building, residential rentals, retail developments, office and we’ve gone into the infrastructure space, partnering with covenant Health recently. So we’ve got a really diverse portfolio of activity that gives us both a business to business view, but also a business to consumer view, and really gives us a real tacit feel for what’s happening in the front lines with individuals as they’re interacting with their largest decision, whether it’s. Buying a house, or where they’re going to live in a rental accommodation.
RYAN HASTMAN: Yeah, maybe we should acknowledge for listeners, that you and I worked together on that project. And so healthcare is another one of those areas where it seems like Alberta just can’t keep up. The Alberta is calling campaign seems to have been a smashing success, maybe too good, and we’ve got all these people who have moved here now, like you said, 400,000 new residents. I mean that four red deers, or even, like a London Ontario. And you know, we’re just seeing incredible growth, but incredible demand on the system as well. So Rohit, like, what do you think the housing market looks like for all those people who are arriving now.
ROHIT GUPTA: If we look back to pre-2020, the market was actually largely elastic and was able to satisfy the needs of everybody that was moving here. But as covid hit, and then we had massive immigration policies that took place, and the growth of the oil sands, in terms of pricing of oil, started accelerating, and we got the trans mountain opened up, the demand has exceeded the supply capacity of the marketplace, and part of it is our ability to construct as as constructors, but also the ability to get approvals through municipalities, started to occur.
Now, as we started moving into the 2025 we started seeing a balancing as the demand function has slowed down, where immigration has started slowing down, we’re starting to see construction activity catch up, both in the residential rental side and on the new home builder side, I would say there’s still a significant deficit for residents in terms of schools, hospitals, libraries, rec facilities, all these other amenities that are needed to make the complete community to occur or to exist.
RYAN HASTMAN: You know, on immigration, both the feds and the province are talking about a need to really slow down a bit or get a handle on it. Ottawa and Prime Minister Carney has announced some change there, which, of course, is going to impact the GDP growth and how things have been growing. So, Alicia, what effect do you think it would have on Alberta’s economy if we were to slow down immigration?
ALICIA PLANINCIC: Yeah, I mean, I think just to kind of pull on what Rohit was talking there. I think what we’re seeing right now is we’re still playing a lot of catch up. There was, there was actually a time that we were seeing basically three new households moving to Alberta for every one new home that we were building, because we just couldn’t build that quickly, right? You can’t just build 400,000 more homes overnight, essentially. So I think that that will give us some time to play a little bit of catch up. You know, there have been some comments made around whether decreasing immigration will increase GDP per capita. So basically, GDP per capita being the measure of the size of our of Canada’s economy on a per person basis. So basically, how much value do we each kind of individually create important for our incomes, essentially, is what that translates to. And so there’s been kind of a hypothesis thrown around that it will increase our GDP per capita. And I think that’s true, but probably a little bit misleading in terms of what we normally think that to mean.
RYAN HASTMAN: Changing the denominator doesn’t change the actual number. It just makes it look different, right?
ALICIA PLANINCIC: Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think, you know, if you think about why GDP per capita fell as we raised immigration, there are kind of two reasons. So one is just a short term. It takes time, right? When you get to a new labour market, I moved from the US to Canada in 2019 you know, I was for a while tutoring university students, probably not the best use of my time. It was quite fun, but took time to actually get a full time job.
And so if you kind of layer on the fact that, you know, some folks might not speak English right away or have cultural barriers, there’s just a time to get folks up to speed. So that’s that’s part of it, but the other part, and what we saw with the federal policy was who immigration was prioritising, or who the kinds of folks that were being prioritised for immigration were primarily low skilled immigrants. So essentially, think of cashiers at Tim Horton’s versus, you know, researchers and scientists and so there was really a compositional change of in terms of just who makes up the Alberta or Canadian economy, and so I think we’ll start to see some rebalancing, where individual people in households might not feel richer in the same way they didn’t feel poor before. But we’re kind of seeing that rebalance.
RYAN HASTMAN: Rohit, what effect will changes to either immigration or even maybe specifically the temporary foreign workers programme have on your industry?
ROHIT GUPTA: I go back to a story my father told me, or told a bunch of us, actually, it’s we came out of an environment where it’s going from 40 degrees Celsius and it’s coming down to about 15 degrees Celsius, and it feels like we need to put on a jacket, get rid of our shorts, put on jeans, put on long sleeve shirts and everything. But if it was minus five and it went to 15 degrees, we’d be wearing shorts and flip flops and then running around. And so I would say the environment we’re coming out of is a scorching heat out of a PEI, where you’re at, and come back to where Edmonton is at, where it’s raining a little bit right now. And so. Come down to 15 degrees, and so we’re coming back to the norm. I think the household formations are still similar to what patterns to what they were in 2019 I would say Alberta and Saskatchewan, having very resilient and elastic supply programmes.
From a housing perspective, being that the municipalities are very responsive, on a relative basis, they’re going to have a positive environment where we’ll get normalised pretty quickly within a 12 to 24 month environment. When I look at a market like Ontario or Ottawa, I don’t see that supply elasticity. I don’t see the municipal governments working towards solving the problems at this point. I don’t see them aligned with the province, or as aligned as Albertan municipalities are with the Alberta province. So I see significant problems occurring in markets like Ontario and BC, and they’re continuing divising elasticity and supply and elasticity.
RYAN HASTMAN: You know, it’s incredible. The difference is like so in Alberta, just my whole adult life, I feel like there’s just been nothing about development and housing. You know, Rohit has some great properties on the external part of St. Albert right now. And three, four years ago, it was literally a farmer’s field. And all of us can tell that story about every community we’re in across Alberta, but when you go to Ontario, like you said, you don’t see that. And it’s funny, you mentioned PEI. So listeners may be interested to know that I’m in PEI right now. First of all, there’s a lot of Alberta plates driving around. Second of all, there’s actually a lot of growth. So they’re building multi family housing. They’re building apartment buildings, a lot of stuff. It almost feels like Alberta in one kind of spot by Charlottetown, anyway, but yeah, that that growth, you don’t see it in the rest of the country, and I have no idea how they’re even going to begin to accommodate the influx that they’ve had.
ROHIT GUPTA: I think it’s a two part story, right? Like part of it is the tariff fear that Alicia was referencing, but I would argue that the slowdown in Ontario and BC that were experiencing in housing was largely started with interest rate spike that we saw a couple of years three years ago. Now that’s just starting to bite harder and harder. So the affordability that the prairie provinces had been protecting has started to benefit us in the sense that, yes, housing affordability has declined because of the rise in interest rates, but at the same time, we’ve been able to meet the needs of the consumer largely, whereas in Ontario, BC, that you see a lot of projects slowing down once CMHC started rolling back some of its programmes on for rental housing and trying to be a little bit more discerning and who it’s giving its insurance product to. From a large developer pool perspective, you started seeing just the brakes sliding down. So not only do we have tariff fear, but we also have a construction slowdown in those markets. And I would say it’s quite different here, where we’re working through our backlog and we’ll continue to be fully employed within the construction industry.
ALICIA PLANINCIC: Rohit’s point is a great one in terms of what led people to come to Alberta. It’s largely housing affordability and being priced out of those other markets. I mean, I remember as a part of the Alberta is calling campaign. There was a statement about the sell your home in Ontario, or whatever it was, by three in Alberta. And what’s funny is, the numbers work out that it’s not that far off. And even more so, of course, and Edmonton is, you know, even more affordable than Calgary. What was interesting with kind of how we saw the movement change was it felt like folks were first kind of coming into the Calgary market, and then later on, there was almost a shift into the Edmonton market, as the Calgary market started to really heat up and become really expensive, especially, frankly, in the rental market, which totally caught fire in kind of 2022.
RYAN HASTMAN: Right. Are we going to have the same sort of condo glut here that you’re seeing in the west coast and in Ontario?
ALICIA PLANINCIC: Yeah. I mean, so in terms of what builders are building, we’ve seen a shift into multi unit, you know, housing, not just single, single detached homes, which has kind of been the norm previously in Alberta. We’re definitely seeing that shift play out, for sure. And I think the other big reality for Alberta, or the shift, is we’ve seen a huge increase in demand for folks in the skilled trades, right, way more than any other province. I’m sure Rohit can speak to this, but the labour shortages there are just so acute versus everywhere else. You know, all other industries, that’s not their biggest issue, but in construction, big issue continues to be just finding workers.
RYAN HASTMAN: So this pod is supposed to be about two things, telling Alberta’s story to central Canada, and also Alberta talking to itself. And so we’re trying to facilitate that lens. And I’m thinking about the issue of inter provincial trade. You know, it’s been something that’s been talked about as long as I’ve been involved in politics. Interprovincial trade barriers has almost become a bit of a cliche. Do you think it’s a big barrier to Alberta’s economic growth? And second of all, if you had a magic wand or you had the ability to talk to the Prime Minister, what would you want to fix first?
ROHIT GUPTA: Honestly, from our perspective, the interprovincial trade in our industry hasn’t been a material impediment. Large components of our supply come out of the US market, or they come from China into the US market, and then up to Alberta, and we have the luxury of being next to softwood lumber, so it makes it really easy from a mills perspective. But if I was to talk about commerce. When we’ve expanded to Ontario, we might as well have gone to France, like it is a completely different economy, different structure. And we’ve talked about a lot of times where it would have been easier to go north, south from a cultural perspective than it would have been to go east, west. And so we have to start talking about interprovincial trade by trying to make sure that our business barriers interprovincially are reduced so that we can be culturally more cohesive as a country. That’s how I look at it.
And if I had a chance to talk to Carney, I would actually be really pressing hard on how the federal government, provincial governments and municipal governments and municipal governments look at infrastructure delivery and try to allow them to start looking at how, how do we use private sector to deliver more more of these projects, and how do we work with them? Because if you look at France and how much it costs to deploy an extra mile, one mile of subway, LRT, versus what we do in North America, it’s about a 10x differential. You have to start thinking that either the Europeans are have found a mechanism by insourcing all of these skills internally and done it really well. But if we don’t have that volume of people, we don’t have the volume projects, maybe we have to develop better partnerships with our private sector marketplace to help deliver these project delivery. So that’s probably the biggest economic boom I could argue for.
RYAN HASTMAN: So you’re saying France is roughly 10 times better at infrastructure development than we are?
ROHIT GUPTA: Cheaper on LRT.
RYAN HASTMAN: Even with all those baguettes and wine and all the stereotypes about the work ethic? You know, that’s pretty shocking.
ALICIA PLANINCIC: I mean, I think we, we don’t truly have a national economy, and I think that’s a problem, not just for Alberta. That’s a problem for all provinces. And this is something that we’ve been sort of talking to death forever. I mean, I think it’s great to see sort of renewed interest in this topic. And so we’ve seen a lot of, you know, handshaking and deal making across provinces. I would say, though, the thing that we haven’t seen as much of that I would like to see, and this is less really about the Prime Minister, more about individual provinces. Is just individual provinces removing their own barriers. So not a mutual recognition. But just saying, look, if you are a nurse anywhere in Canada, that is good enough for us. You’re welcome to move here, and then individual provinces, hopefully will feel encouraged to do the same, right? The more movement of people too that we have across the country. That’s a stronger economy, right? If we think back to that skilled trades problem, the easier that we make it for folks to fill jobs where they are available, the stronger economy we’re going to have.
RYAN HASTMAN: This is a step further than what say Nova Scotia did a couple months ago, where they said we will match any province reducing barriers. This is closer to what Alberta has already done. Is that what you’re saying, or am I hearing it wrong?
ALICIA PLANINCIC: Yeah, I think Alberta has already done some of those things, but could probably take it even further, right? Yeah. And don’t worry about what other provinces do, or whether they agree, just say this is what we’re going to do here in Alberta. If you want to buy beer or wine from whatever is your favourite brewery or winery anywhere in Canada, that’s great. And hopefully other provinces will be encouraged to do the same, because this kind of back and forth partnerships, that’s just going to take forever, right? To actually see progress. It’s great to see it happening. I don’t want to discount the fact that this is great to see something happening. But even better, would just be individual provinces. Yeah, do your own thing.
RYAN HASTMAN: Yeah, it’s funny being out here in the Atlantic provinces, you know, Alberta actually has a very different image here than, you know, Ontario or BC. When we’re driving around with a car here that has Alberta plates. People are friendly. They’re happy. They give us the thumbs up, or, more frequently, they tell us a story about someone they know who’s out in Alberta working, or who you know worked and has come back. So you kind of appreciate the country a bit more interestingly, when you’re way out here on the edge compared to the middle. And I think that is something that we just have to keep working on. So, okay, well, then you know, if you could eliminate anything else, is there any other things that you’d recommend to the provincial government that they take a look at specifically?
ROHIT GUPTA: I’m gonna take an absurd example. But when we look at any type of protocol that is ever created in the technology environment, there’s a negotiation or navigation where a bunch of companies get together and they give up some of their rights to be part of the standardised protocol which allows their whole industry to expand. And so we’re trying to do that in the home entertainment system or the home smart system. We’ll do that with internet protocols and so forth. I. Think to a certain degree, we as a province have to also be okay by giving some of our non provincial rights. But start giving up, whether it’s a pega or the Medical Association, whatever it is, coming to a mutual agreement upon what these standard protocols could be, or standards we could be to allow labour mobility to exist.
And so instead of having our team draft up our platform or our our requirements in isolation, we allow for that to be negotiated at the provincial level and between maybe even two or three provinces. Maybe it’s not a national problem we’re solving. We solve a problem between Saskatchewan and Alberta and Manitoba. Solve that because culturally, we’re very much similar, much more similar. Why not solve it between the three provinces and allow that mobility to exist, and once that standardised protocol exists between these two or three provinces, it allows it to expand to other provinces, so in more of an incremental approach, instead of a trying to negotiate all parties at the same time. And we have to start really reflecting upon these non economic care. What does Trump use it as there’s tariffs that are economic tariffs, and but then there’s non economic tariffs that exist that make it difficult to do business. And so we really have to start talking from both perspectives. We don’t have a lot of tariffs, but we have a lot of non economic tariffs that exist between us from a language perspective. And I would argue that Alberta has its own that it imposes upon different businesses or different groups across the country too.
RYAN HASTMAN: Yeah, you know you mentioned, like integration north, south and so Alberta, of course. And we had Nathan Cooper on on the show recently, but Alberta has relationships with all the Northwest states. So there’s groups like pen war, and then if you follow sort of that pipeline direction, we have our relationships with Oklahoma and Louisiana and Texas and all this. So Alberta’s relationship is relationships are very much integrated virtually or sorry, so north, south, and I think culturally it’s similar, like Idaho and Montana and southern Alberta feel pretty similar. So okay, Alicia, I’m gonna get to some personal stuff, but I’ll give you a chance to just talk a little more policy. Is there any recommendations that you would make to the provincial government?
ALICIA PLANINCIC: Yeah. I mean, I think the big one is again, refocusing on those interprovincial trade barriers. I think it’s one of those issues that was really, you know, we heard a lot about under Jason Kinney, and then it kind of just got, I think, forgotten about or pushed aside, you know, with the pandemic and all the things. So I’d love to see more focus on that. And I totally agree with Rohit’s ideas. And I just think, yeah, being able to, you know, distinguish between, where can we encourage the federal government to do, to take different policy measures versus what’s within our own control. And one of those big things within our own control is those interprovincial trade barriers.
ROHIT GUPTA: One thing I’d love to add is I’m gonna give an attaboy to Nate Glubish as he brought his name up, gotta give him a real attaboy for the work he’s doing with data centres and trying to bring that business here. One of the things that we always talk about is, how do we refine our products here in Canada, in Alberta, and then export them, instead of allowing the value add function to go down to Texas or the Gulf Coast, the fact that we’re bringing in data centres here, and we’re going to use our own energy resources to be able to recycle into we are literally converting raw materials into a finished good called data streams, right?
RYAN HASTMAN: We don’t do that with what we don’t do that with oil, but now we’re finding a way to do it with data. So you’re right. It is actually incredible.
ROHIT GUPTA: Yeah, so I just if the province could figure out how to balance the need to bring the data centres in with making sure that we don’t drive up energy costs for our citizens, and we can balance and find a great happy medium there. Man, this can be a banger province to be in, because not only will we be consuming our own resources and getting the value add benefit out of it, but we’ll be also bringing in technologists, or technology companies that will want to benefit off the proximity to data centres. And so you have a potential knock on boom that happens that drives when the next commodity cycle goes bust. We have a knock on boom for technology that comes into into this province. So there is, there’s a banger opportunity here.
RYAN HASTMAN: Well, and if you think about it, so we’ve got abundant resources for energy. We’ve got the land and the space, and we’ve got a fairly cold climate most of the year. So it’s like we’re turning these natural all elements into a competitive advantage. It’s exactly what we should be doing. Good, good reference.
ROHIT GUPTA: And guess what? We’re a winter city. Yeah, we have fun at it too.
RYAN HASTMAN: The natural cooling. Power of our climate is going to come in handy when these data centres need it. So well, that’s great. As I was preparing for the show is just reviewing both your backgrounds, and I find them both really interesting. So you know, I’m going to put you both on the spot a little bit here. So get ready for that. But Alicia, you come to us from the States. So what did you think of Alberta before you came here, and how has your experience been now that you’ve been here for quite a while?
ALICIA PLANINCIC: Yeah. I mean, to be honest, this is probably the most American answer I can give to you. I knew very little about Alberta before I came here. And in fact, the longer story is I met my Canadian husband in the US, and actually he was living in Manitoba. And so I first moved there, actually, and then we decided to move roughly November before the first winter, and have never looked back since nothing against Manitoba. But you know, your comment earlier really resonated with me, though, in terms of we actually came here for a wedding, just friends before moving here, and that was kind of the moment where, like, yeah, this, this is the place we want to be. And honestly, it was the the friendliness of the people I’m from, kind of small rural community in the Midwest, and just the friendliness of the people here, and just the interest and being outdoors and doing all the things just really, really drift in, like we really are kind of a funny story of just visiting together once, and we’re like, yeah, we’re moving here. And our friends and family thought we were a little bit nuts, but we did it. We found jobs, and have never looked back.
RYAN HASTMAN: You know, Alberta is full of people who came from somewhere else. That part isn’t exceptional. But I always find it interesting when people come from the States, because a lot of our competitive advantages around a business climate, low tax, environment, regulatory stuff is an advantage in the Canadian context, but it’s not necessarily the same advantage when you compare it with America. So I’m glad to hear that we’ve got an evangelist of Alberta in you.
ALICIA PLANINCIC: Yeah. Love kind of trumped any sort of job opportunity, purely on the basis of job opportunity, yeah.
RYAN HASTMAN: Trumped is another word that we could probably get in. You know, it’s been interesting just talking last episode with Josh Wingrove, who’s a reporter in Washington, and Americans don’t realise just how upset Canadians were over the 51st state. However, I bet you that’s statistically less true in Alberta, and that’s something that this show is kind of designed to really have a conversation about, how does Alberta feel about its role in Canada? And so as you’ve been here for a little while, like, do you think of us, do you think of yourself as a transplant Canadian or a transplant Albertan first?
ALICIA PLANINCIC: Yeah, it’s funny, because I’ve gotten that question, you know, earlier this year, when all the tariffs and all the threats and things are just really changing, when the with the US and Canada relationship of, you know, kind of how is it as an American to experience this? And my answer was actually that, well, I’m actually experiencing it as a Canadian, right? I am on this side of the border, and I still watch a lot of American news, but I watch it really from the perspective of a Canadian. And you know, it’s been, frankly, extremely frustrating and, you know, a little bit emotional to watch it all play out and transpire. But yeah, I do feel like I’m experiencing it more as a Canadian, really, than as an American. And it’s I will seem a little bit relieved to watch news and to be a bit of an outsider, rather than right there in the midst of it. But it’s certainly not good for Canada either, of course.
RYAN HASTMAN: Yeah, well, we won’t blame you too much for Trump. Okay, so Rohit, you and I know each other a little bit off camera. I just wonder, if you want to just tell visitors, or visitors viewers, really, how you got to be the head of such a large company, and why you continue to stay here in Alberta and operate your business, when really, you could probably move the company to other markets if you wanted to.
ROHIT GUPTA: Well, it’s kind of a silver spoon issue for me. I’m second generation in the business, and I got the benefit of following in my father and my mother’s footsteps, but if we go back to my dad’s a throughbred entrepreneur, and started the business with one credit card with his friends, and started building homes, and so I got the opportunity to join the business after graduating out of university. It’s been a slog. It’s been it’s been fun.
Any family business, anybody who knows family business, has its ups and downs, but we’ve had the real benefit of having really educated team members and being part of a business that’s very entrepreneurial, that has taken a lot of risk, and we were exposed to Fort McMurray at the early genesis so we’ve got a real ethos about the oil and gas market, both in a suburban like a small market, but also large market in Edmonton. And then transformed that allowed us to create this platform for ourselves. But what keeps me in Edmonton, honestly, is if you look at any construction business that has largely has grown across Canada, if you look at PCL, and you look at Chandos and Clark and all these guys, they’re all a Burton businesses and and, and so it’s this really tough environments, a super hyper competitive construction environment that allows us to expand and compete in different markets. So I tend to compare Edmonton to Houston and Calgary to Dallas. And so in Dallas, there’s gun fights in Houston, there’s knife fights. So it’s kind of the same type of environment in terms of we’re much more scrappier as an entity.
And you see that a lot with home builders out of Edmonton now starting expanding to the Calgary market, a lot scrappier, but they don’t necessarily have the chutzpah or some of the risk taking mentality that you would see in the Calgary marketplace of the builders. Yeah, and so that’s part of what’s kept us here. But then the second and most important thing is, like, if you want a family, where else do you want to be? I got great ravines. I got my my whole family’s here. Everybody owns a single like housing, and they’ve got kids set up here. The public schools are great. I don’t have to fight for private schools or public schools. And so my kid’s gonna be with business leaders, but also be with politicians and lawyers and doctors, but also electricians and the cashier as he’s going up through school, and they’re gonna be all his friends, and he’s gonna have a broad demographic of people that are gonna be his friends.
And so that’s a huge part of the benefit of being here in Edmonton, and that’s what drives us, is that the community is wonderful. You can move around the community easily, and you get to meet every aspect of life. And if we need to travel anywhere in the world, we can so what is the motive for me to move anywhere else but be with my family and friends and watch them all raise families easily in a good, great environment?
RYAN HASTMAN: Well, that’s awesome. We’re going to end by asking each of you to give me a probability, maybe from zero to 100 that by the end of Mark Carney’s first term as the elected prime minister, that we will have a large national energy infrastructure project, whether it’s a pipeline or a corridor, I want to know how likely you think it is so Alicia, let’s start with you.
ALICIA PLANINCIC: Oh, gosh, that is a great question. I’m gonna ignore being rational and quantitative, and I’m just gonna go in on all in 100%. Let’s do it.
RYAN HASTMAN: 100%! Okay. Wow. I love it. You know, if you’re gonna say something, go hard or go home, right? Okay, Rohit, what about you?
ROHIT GUPTA: I think it’s like 10%. I’m not a believer. Yet I still see too many barriers. I see hidden rhetoric in a lot of the language that we hear. So I think Alberta needs to keep advocating and needs to keep pushing for it aggressively, because if we stop advocating, it’ll never happen. It’s like how they say if you don’t shoot, you won’t score any goals. But at the same time, we need to be mindful that there’s a lot of barriers and a lot of policies we have to unwind that have come about over the last 15 years that have prevented pipelines from existing.
RYAN HASTMAN: Okay, so we’ve got 10% or 100%. Well, thanks again for the conversation. It’s been wonderful. You’ve been listening to Rohit Gupta, who’s the president of the Rohit Group, based here in Edmonton, and Alicia Planincic, who’s an economist with the Business Council of Alberta. And I’m Ryan Hastman.
