Premiers, energy ministers, CEOs and a throng of international visitors are poised to descend on Calgary next week, when the annual Global Energy Show kicks off against a vastly different backdrop than the event last year.
A year ago Alberta Premier Danielle Smith was just beginning to float the idea of a new West Coast oil pipeline, her government had yet to sign an energy accord with Ottawa setting out conditions for that plan and there was no war in the Middle East upending energy markets.
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Nick Samain, senior vice-president at DMG Events, says organizers are expecting more than 30,000 attendees at the conference and trade show this year — much of it driven by international visitors interested in what Canada has to offer.
He says 500 exhibitors are expected on the trade show floor, an increase of more than 10 per cent from a year earlier, many of them international pavilions that haven’t been there in the past.
Samain says the surge in international interest speaks to how people are “taking Canada seriously as an energy producer.”
Among the scheduled speakers are federal Natural Resources Minister Tim Hodgson, the premiers of Alberta, Saskatchewan and the Northwest Territories and the CEO of Abu Dhabi National Oil Co’s upstream division.
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