Properity comes to the Prairies
Saskatchewan`s great bust-to-boom ride can be charted through its iconic vehicles – starting with the 1930s "Bennett Buggies," stripped-down cars drawn by horses and derisively named after a Depression prime minister.
Fast-forward to the hulking combines of the Big Wheat economy, and the pickup trucks that marked the oil-roughneck phase of the past decade.
So what will be the representative vehicles of the coming years? Very likely, they will be the $120,000 Porsches that will soon adorn Vaughn Wyant`s Saskatoon showrooms – the new buggies for professionals and executives who typify a thrusting Saskatchewan.
Mr. Wyant`s imminent opening of Saskatchewan`s first full-service Porsche dealer signals that the province, and the city of Saskatoon, are emerging from their post-Depression funk – a long period of economic lethargy that wheat markets, even in their best years, were never able to banish.
Saskatoon is engulfed in a paroxysm of conspicuous spending, from the million-dollar-plus houses in the Willows, the golf course development near Mr. Wyant`s suburban showroom, to the forest of cranes at University of Saskatchewan, which is in the midst of a billion-dollar building program.
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