Introduction | Bison Economy | Kootisaw | Fort Calgary | Ranching | Agriculture
1895-1946 | 1947-1970 | 1971-1991 | Oil & Gas | Diversification | Ethnicity | Labour | Women
Calgary & Southern Alberta
The Modern Calgary Skyline: Courtesy of the
City of Calgary
Beginning in the 1970s, Calgary experienced remarkable growth. The latter part of the 1960s and the 1970s witnessed the arrival of young professionals and skilled and semi-skilled labourers from throughout Canada and the United States. While the city contained approximately 400,000 people in 1971, that number had increased to nearly 750,000 by the early 1990s. As Alberta’s leading financial centre, Calgary and its skyline were transformed by sleek steel and glass skyscrapers.
Peter Lougheed’s Progressive Conservative Party came to power in 1971 and it reflected Alberta’s new urban spirit. Lougheed, a Harvard-educated Calgary lawyer supported by friends and business associates, offered rural and urban Albertans free enterprise, conservatism with urban middle-class respectability, and a vague social conscience. Social Credit’s political demise symbolised the passing of power from the hands of teachers, farmers, and small businessmen to a new, young, and largely urban middle-class.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Calgary’s reliance on one industry continued to make it susceptible to boom and bust cycles. Economic recession in the early 1980s resulted in economic dislocation and net-migration out of the province. Calgary’s prosperity and conservative heritage, furthermore, hampered its relationship with the federal government that, between 1968 and 1984, was dominated by the Liberal Party. Calgary’s wish to break free from its reliance on oil and gas was expressed most clearly in 1988 when it hosted the Winter Olympics. Business, political, and social leaders expressed the hope that tourism, forestry, and high technology would be the key to economic diversification. The Olympics symbolised the degree to which Calgary had emerged, over the course of one century, from a remote frontier town to a complex urban centre linked economically, socially, and culturally to the international community.
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