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Edmonton is a young city in a lot of ways. I don't want to say it's the Wild West, but it kind of is. There's a lot of opportunity for people who are ambitious and want to try and do things and make an impact themselves.

There's a really good sense of community over and above what you'd expect. I have a lot of friends that moved to the U.S., and what they realized when they started having kids was that they wanted to come back to the Edmonton area. And these are people who weren’t originally from here.

There's a bit more of a social safety net here; a very subtle undertone of people looking out for each other in their environment. That's unwritten and it's very hard to put a tangible element around that. But I think it's a reality here.

I've seen all kinds of situations that illustrate this. There are situations where people are short on money and need to borrow a few thousand dollars and people are willing to do that. Or people lose their jobs and they need a place to stay. Just little tiny things, you know, so that you don't fall through the cracks.

As an academic, I've had events in my life where things didn't go as they should. And there's been numerous times when other academics have kind of stepped in to help me, have kind of stuck out their necks to say that, you know what, this isn't right even though they're maybe jeopardizing their own grants or their own situations by doing so. That's in the academic world, but I've seen that in other situations too.