[Corndogger]

Originally Posted by ssiguy

The only city in Canada that has a shot is Toronto. I would put Calgary, Ottawa, and Montreal ahead of Vancouver's chances. Why on earth would a company set up a massive secondary office only 200km from it's main office and it's advantages of having a port and Asian gateway are also irrelevant as Seattle has the same and in Vancouver due to the high cost of living employers can't even find people to fill current open positions.

It has to be a place that has great continental, local, and international connections which writes off Ottawa and getting a massive amount of high tech bilingual staff for a Montreal base would be very hard. It does have the advantage of having a large creative class, low cost of living and very cheap Hydro but I don't think that's enough to outway the language issues. It has a great urban scene and Metro but Trudeaau Internatonal is not a very well connected airport

Chicago has excellent transportation connections and a high skilled workforce but the state's finances are in horriid shape and both Iiiinois and Chicago are dropping in population much of that due to very high taxes in general and extremely high crime rates in Chicago in particular.

If urban transit plays a part then Austin is a right off but both Dallas and Atlanta have some RT which helps but neither have a good transit system. Both have high crime raates but nothing even close to Chicago. Atlanta has the benefit of being in an Eastern timezone and the world's busiest and most connected airport but still has a huge image problem where it might find it difficult to get skilled labour.

To me it will come down to just 2 cities............Toronto and Boston. Both are safe cities, Eastern time zone, have excellent universities, a very educated workforce, and large established high tech industry, large airports, good transit systems, have large creative classes,and offer a high quality of life that few other cities can match.

The advantage for Boston is that it is in the US so the border is no problem nor is an anti-free trade President. Conversely Toronto offers the huge wage subsidy of our dollar and due to Canada's much more liberal and welcoming immigrant attitudes getting international workers to relocate is much easier knowing the workers will bemore welcomed both economically but also politically and socially.

Has Amazon said why they want to do this? And why is everyone discounting Europe? A second headquarters in North America makes little sense when you think about it.