Thank you, gentlemen, and Mr. Saunderson, for your optimistic view of Alberta in 2017, my home province. I'm afraid I don't share your optimism, and I'll bet you a steak dinner next year this time when you're back.
I think 2017 is going to be a more difficult year than 2016 was. You didn't really touch on construction. There's still a fair bit of construction happening in Alberta. I think about the major oil sands plant of Suncor still under construction, done in 2017; the North West upgrader, 5,000 people, done in early 2018; seven buildings still going up in downtown Calgary. They will be done in 2017. The arena project in Edmonton is done, with the fact that there's still a building going up next to it, done in 2017.
I think it's going to be a horrible year for construction activity through 2017, 2018, and 2019. There's just nothing on the drawing board. I think it's going to be a tough year. Then we layer on top of that a carbon tax on January 1, as you mentioned, winding down coal, and then an increase of the minimum wage to $15. All of this is predicated on the fact that, even if a pipeline is approved this fall, which we all have high doubts that it will be, construction is not going to start and return any sort of economic return to the province in 2017.
I know a year ago they were predicting oil was going to be $60 by the end of 2016. Here we are fighting like hell to get back to $45. I think 2017 is going to be very, very difficult in Alberta, and the unemployment rate will hit close to double-digit numbers.
We'll see who buys the steak dinner next year, but I appreciate your optimism.
I want to just touch a little bit on the question that Mr. MacKinnon raised around diversification. I'd like your view on diversification, because I think there's a strongly held view out there that diversification should be built on some of your strengths. I think if you look at what's happened in Alberta over the past number of years, you have very strong diversification into agrifood, you have fairly strong diversification out of the energy industry into petrochemicals and some others, obviously a lot of things on which you could have expanded. At the end of the day, when you start to assess where diversification should and could go into the future, how much of that is based on working off your base industries? We're not going to bring auto manufacturing to Alberta, and we don't want to, but give me your view on working off the base industry that's there.