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Calgary’s entrepreneurial culture is even easier to spot than the hundreds of steel and glass connections crisscrossing the city’s core. It hits new Calgarians like myself almost instantly; that infectious feeling of limitless raw potential, of broken barriers to success and endless possibilities.

This is a city of risk takers, of dreamers and of visionary builders. All of these enviable traits have, however, been relatively unknown in the rest of Canada, until now.

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In a survey by Canadian Federation of Independent Businesses for the Financial Post, Calgary ranked as the 13th most entrepreneurial city in Canada this year. Not exactly a statistic to brag about, although it is a dramatic jump from No. 35 last year.

“The story on Calgary is getting out,” said Mike Fotheringham, research manager at Calgary Economic Development. “People across the country are starting to understand what is going on in this city.”

There is a sense that if you’ve got an idea, this is the place to make it happen and I think the stats reveal exactly that

Bankruptcy rates here are among the lowest in the country at just 1%, and have fallen every year since 2002. Retail sales growth also tends to be more than double the national average of 3%, reflecting Calgary’s growing affluence.

“There is a sense that if you’ve got an idea, this is the place to make it happen and I think the stats reveal exactly that,” Mr. Fotheringham said.

What the statistics do not reveal is another sense, of the opportunities here being as rich and thick as the bitumen that powers Calgary’s massive oil towers. The sense is not only that such opportunities exist, but that achieving even the loftiest of them can be done without the vast support networks required elsewhere.