According to a recent report issued by the TD Bank, Alberta's economy is headed in the right direction and the Team Lead for Airdrie Economic Development tends to agree.

The report from TD Deputy Chief Economist Derek Burleton forecasts economic growth of between two and two and a half percent next year in Alberta.  That follows an almost five percent increase in 2017.

Kent Rupert of Airdrie Economic Development says he believes the economy in the city is also headed upwards.  "I always say that we kind of live in our own world here.  We just kind of plug along.  Certainly, in the last couple of years, we've seen our commercial continue to be fairly strong with a couple of new developments."

According to the TD report, the Achilles heel in Alberta's recovery from the recession is a lack of investment in the province, particularly, Burleton says, in the oil and gas sector.  Rupert says he's also seen investment slow down in Airdrie, although it hasn't hit us quite so hard.

"Where we've seen the slowdown is in the investment attraction side and bringing them, sort of more industrial and that type of thing," explains Rupert. "That being said, I'm still quite happy with some of the industrial we're bringing in, they're smaller projects but they still bring in employment."

Rupert says the slowdown is partially due to the recession but is also due to the competition that Airdrie now faces from some of its neighbours.

"12 years ago there was the Calgary Airport and Airdrie, and now we have the development that the airport's doing, the development that Calgary's doing, north Calgary, and then we have Rocky View.  I would say in the region it's been fairly good.  We're known as a transportation and logistics hub in Canada now, sort of an inland port type of idea.  I think for the region, we're still doing well with Amazon coming in, and things like that."

The TD report goes on to say that employment in the province is back to the level it was pre-recession but a lot of the jobs are self-employed.  Rupert notes that's also true in Airdrie, but it's nothing new for city entrepreneurs.

"That's always been happening in Airdrie.  We have one of the more entrepreneurial communities in western Canada, certainly in Alberta.  We look at other communities and how many home-based businesses they have and we're way in front of other communities our size.  I think that attributes to our demographics, we have a younger demographic.  We're at a really exciting place being such an entrepreneurial community."

Rupert says between home-based and storefront businesses, Airdrie has 30 to 40 startup every month.

Indicators from other economists that Airdrie Economic Development follows also show Alberta's, and Airdrie's, economy getting stronger. 

Rupert says, "Restaurant sales are up 2.3 percent higher in June over last year, so people are going out and spending more money.  Even in the oil.  Production is slowly increasing over the next few years.  You look at the oil sands.  They're still getting oil to market, it's just in rail cars.  This year I think we've done over 16,000 rail cars that have gone to the coast, and that's a record high, almost eight times what it was ten years ago.  So, yes, we absolutely need the pipelines, but the oil industry is finding other means to get it to market."

Questions, comments or story ideas? Email us at news@discoverairdrie.com