People are missing that it isn't 50,000 people tomorrow.
They are asking for 500,000+ sqft by 2019. So at most that is 5000 people. Then it will expand from there. Then you have probably 20 years to build to 50k. So if you look at the Calgary economic region population during the oil boom in 2003 it was 1.1 million in 2016 it was 1.5 million. So the Calgary economic region added 400k people to support an oil and gas boom. So adding 200k people to support a tech boom over a similar time frame doesn't seem out of the question.
The East Coast vs Weat Coast option is interesting. To me it's not a clear advantage to have your second head office a 3hr time zone difference from your first. Amazon is big enough that people come to it so from a supplier standpoint it can be wherever. Amazon needs logistics facilities in every city of a million or more in order to do one day service so an eastern office might make sense.
I think the big reason for this is that they need a different population base to recruit from. Tech people will move for you but your lower level employees aren't moving and if the goal is to churn you need wider net to draw from. That would for sure exclude Vancouver but possibly not Calgary.
The biggest reason for a Canadian city would be immigration risk and possibly branding to the rest of the world. And in the Canadian city competition I think Calgary would win unless you could convince them that Kitchener/Waterloo is an option.
The big test in any Calgary bid isn't competing against US cities. It's convincing Amazon that its in their long term interest not to have all their eggs in the US basket.
That said Denver, Dallas, or North Carolina would be my picks to win.
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