Category Archives: Business

Jul 21 2014
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Business, Politics

Rothesay mayor finds crow perfectly digestible

 

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Everyone deserves a second chance or, at least, a second helping of one’s own words, refried, re-seasoned and finally made palatable, if only just.

So it was last week when Rothesay, New Brunswick, Mayor Bill Bishop all but retracted his comments about the dreaded Funky Monkey Sandwich Shop, a food truck from nearby Quispamsis. 

Lest we forget, the Bishop of Rothesay characterized his community thusly: “You have to know Rothesay, it is not your regular community. We people here have been here for decades and they (I, perchance?) have very firm beliefs, and needs and wants and the word change in Rothesay is not a welcome word.”

As the CBC reported, “Bishop said he has nothing against Dan Landry, the Funky Monkey’s owner, but a mobile restaurant is ‘not the type of enterprise that we welcome in Rothesay.’”

What a difference a day and social media makes. No sooner had hizzoner expressed his inner thoughts with his outer voice, the chocolate mousse hit the fan. Facebook and Twitter (themselves, vectors of dreaded “change”) erupted with heaping doses of ridicule, topped with thick dollops of derision. 

Apparently, this inspired the following mea culpa from Rothesay’s first citizen (again, on Facebook and Twitter):

“I have received many calls and emails regarding my comments on the Funky Monkey Food Truck and I have also seen the considerable debate this has generated in social media. Clearly, I chose my words poorly and I apologize to those I offended, and in particular to the owners of the Funky Monkey. . .My concern was ensuring that mobile food establishments fit appropriately within municipal regulations and operate fairly with other restaurants. We welcome entrepreneurs to our community and we are grateful to any business, such as the Funky Monkey, that enhances the quality of life in Rothesay.”

Still, I can’t help wonder if Mr. Bishop would have been as effusive in his praise for an establishment that, only 24 hours before, he effectively derided had instant electronic communications never been invented. 

Indeed, the phrase, “It’s too late, now, pal,” comes to mind. 

Four years ago, Darren Cahr, a partner in the Chicago law firm of Drinker Biddle & Reath LLP observed on his blog, Legally Social, “We are entering a new age of transparency – for you. Everyone will know more about you, and your secrets, and every detail of your private existence.”

In fact, he wrote, “Nearly every technological development over the past several years has been devoted to capturing data. Document management systems and data mining, e-mail archives and browser cookies – all of these things and so many more are devoted to finding and maintaining data. But if the growth of electronic media has resulted in the dawn of an age where nothing is ever forgotten, it is suddenly becoming apparent that a lot of folks miss that option. People want to have their mistakes erased, they want to be able to step away from that drunk moment on Twitter. But they can’t.  Individuals are becoming like flies caught in amber, a series of embarrassing moments frozen in time forever.”

 All of which is just one way of saying that the social media – the realm where nothing is ever forgotten – is also a place where nothing is ever forgiven.  

According to a CBC report, various Facebookers were having none of what the mayor offered to serve. 

“I should like to hear the mayor comment on what he actually said, instead of eating crow and commenting on something he did not say,” posted one Thomas Littlewood. “His Worship’s original statement suggests that Rothesay is too elitist to support something like a food truck; now he just wants to make sure that it fits with municipal by-laws? Which is it?”

Added Marlyn Isaac in her post: “The horse is already out of the barn.”

As for Funky Monkey’s tireless proprietor Dan Landry, he’s holding up. Reports from the front lines of the food truck skirmish suggest that he’s having to turn thronging admirers away.  

“At this time, we’re not as worried as we were a couple of days ago,” he told the CBC. “But, yes, there is still a concern that there’s a negative force working against us.” 

Oh, puh-leeze! With enemies like Mayor Bishop, who needs friends?

 

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Jul 18 2014
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Business, Politics

Narrow-mindedness: A dish best served to go

 

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I have no personal beef with Rothesay, New Brunswick, Mayor Bill Bishop. I don’t know the man. But I am exquisitely acquainted with his particular brand of parochialism.

It is the sort of mean-minded, distrustful fear-mongering that undermines diversity, shuts down business opportunities before they have a chance to bloom and gives small, semi-urban communities a bad name from coast to coast to shining coast.

Food trucks. Really, Mr. Mayor? That’s the current and urgent threat to the good people of your Saint John bedroom neighbourhood?

To be clear, hizzoner’s britches are bunched over the Funky Monkey Sandwich Shop – a Traveling Willbury of grilled paninis, which has been operating for several months in the vicinity of Mr. Bishop’s municipal back door.

As this enterprise comes from the foreign country of Quispamsis, about 11 minutes distance from noble Rothesay by car ride, you might (or might not) understand the good fellow’s objection:

“You have to know Rothesay, it is not your regular community,” he rather lamely told the CBC this week. “We people here have been here for decades and they have very firm beliefs, and needs and wants and the word change in Rothesay is not a welcome word.”

Indeed, according to the CBC report, “Bishop said he has nothing against Dan Landry, the Funky Monkey’s owner, but a mobile restaurant is ‘not the type of enterprise that we welcome in Rothesay.’”

Meanwhile, Mr. Landry can’t figure out what the mayor is talking about.

“We’ve had a great summer so far and the community is, very much so, coming out and supporting us. So we don’t have any fears of about whether the community wants us here,” he told the CBC. “I think the people are looking for new food trends, I think the people are looking for new food options and they are looking for real food instead of processed food. I think that these small businesses give people the opportunity to get out there in the market and sell that product without having the costs involved with the brick and mortar investments.”

In fact, the very requirement to defend himself in the court of public opinion, against a fossilized notion of community values, is not the shame of Funky Monkey’s main man; it’s ours. We let this garbage happen all the time, everywhere in this benighted region of ours. We have for years, for decades.

Halifax doesn’t pit itself against Moncton for concerts and sporting events. It fights cage matches for such opportunities against Dartmouth, Bedford and Sackville. 

Sydney would rather witness Cape Breton become a theme park for Chinese technocrats fascinated by the possibilities of a coal-fired, mag-lev monorail than see Glace Bay obtain one, new, pathetic store opening.

We are, in this sea-bound region, our own worst enemies; forever imagining that the town just down the pot-holed road is waiting to pounce, preparing to storm the gates  of our own, oh so very special, burg. After all, don’t you know, Anytown, Atlantic Canada, is “not your regular community.” 

Indeed, “We people here have been here for decades” and we “have very firm beliefs, and needs and wants and the word change”. . .well, friend, it’s just not a welcome word at all.

Parochialism, thy name is Atlantic Canada. 

From our inter-provincial trade barriers to ancient regulations governing skills qualifications and labour mobility – from restrictions on provincial exports of wine to sign posts about honey bee imports – we are a lonely, miserly, short-sighted lot fated, it seems, to suffer all the consequences of our provincialism, insularity and localism.

I have known far too many men and women in this region who have closed their fists, when they might have opened their hands. I have seen them shut their eyes from seeing and block their ears from hearing.

I have also seen and heard these same patriarchs and matriarchs make appalling, disingenuous speeches about the inestimable value of the East Coast way of life, about the incomparable standard this region provides to those lucky enough to have a way to make a living. 

Unless, of course, they happen to run a food truck into a burgermeister’s territory, just down the road from economic perdition.

 

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Jun 26 2014
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Business

Praise be for our disruptive human tendencies

 

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For those of us who do not spend our every idle moment glued to LinkedIn or any number of other warehouses of business management trends, the phrase “disruptive innovation” makes about as much sense as particle physics. In fact, the former may be even more inscrutable than the latter.

So, here is a quick and easy definition, courtesy of Clayton Christensen, the Harvard Business School professor who coined the term and wrote a book on the subject back in 1997: “Disruptive innovation takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves up market, eventually displacing competitors.”

The idea is that “as companies tend to innovate faster than their customers’ needs evolve, most organizations eventually end up producing products or services that are actually too sophisticated, too expensive and too complicated for many in their market.”

Traditionally, this niche approach to marketing and technology development secures higher rates of return on investment and better, more sustained profits, because expert consumers will spend money on gear that they think will separate them from the herd. And herein lies the peril.

By focussing on these so-called “sustaining innovations” producers “unwittingly open the door to disruptive innovations at the bottom end of the market.” An innovation that is disruptive essentially upsets the apple cart by allowing “a whole new population of consumers at the bottom of the market access to a product or service that was historically only accessible to consumers with a lot of money or a lot of skill.”

Call it extinction by inattention. But whatever you call it, examples of disruptive technologies, processes and services are everywhere. 

Think about that smart phone in your pocket. Once upon a time, not so very long ago, it was a ludicrously larded device that, conventional wisdom insisted, would be forever relegated to the lifestyles of the rich and powerful. Now, thanks to some cheap and efficient applications in hardware and software, it’s as common and as pricey as a set of all-weather tires on a Nissan Versa.

New “disruptives” available in the near future will likely include: embedded sensors in that  smart phone you’re caressing that tell you whether you’ve brushed your teeth properly; wearable technologies that, among things, track your sleep patterns; and, naturally, driverless cars that eliminate the dangers of texting while cruising down the highway.

Not everyone thinks this stuff is all it’s cracked up to be. New Yorker writer and Harvard history professor Jill Lepore, in a brilliantly argued essay this month, suggests that Mr. Christensen essentially kites his data by finding facts that are not in evidence. Some of the biggest “disrupters”, she says, are the very firms the theory predicts will and do fail. 

Besides, she suggests, innovation is always inherently upsetting. Companies rise and fall just as easily according to the ephemeral rules of luck and timing. In this case, size and longevity do not necessarily matter. 

Frankly, I take comfort in both views, especially as they apply to southeastern New Brunswick and its acknowledged centre of enterprise, Metro Moncton.

Here, of course, disruption has been our cardinal métier since anyone can remember. 

Once, we were all about shipping and shipbuilding. Then we weren’t. Once, we were all about wholesaling and retailing. Then we weren’t. 

Now, we’re all about IT, multi-modal transportation, health care, and software development. 

Each bump along the road to sustained economic progress elevated disrupters and, in the process, changed our local economy mostly for the better. 

And not just our economy. 

The Petitcodiac River flowed freely for thousands of years before our forebears erected a causeway between Moncton and Riverview in 1968. We disrupted it. Then, a few years ago we disrupted it again by permanently opening the gates. Now, the river attracts surfers from California, desperate to ride the renewed tidal bore for 90 minutes at a go. Disruption? You bet, and thanks be for it. 

In the end, we engineer what we need. Disruption? Perchance, thy name is a multi-purpose, downtown events centre.

 

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Jun 25 2014
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Business, Economy, Employment, Politics

Bring us your tired, yearning to work

 

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Through no fault of their own, 50 million people around the world are rootless and stateless. The victims of wars and warlords, dictators and economic dissolution, they wander the Earth as refugees, as unwilling nomads, and in numbers not recorded since the end of the second, great, European conflagration of the 20th Century.

Meanwhile, the Canadian government – once a beacon of light in the United Nation’s Human Development Index – plays a crass round of poker in which it chooses those immigrants it wants, those it will merely tolerate and those it would rather wash its hands of entirely. 

The latest incarnation of this game of drones is the new regime governing the nation’s Temporary Foreign Workers Program.

Employment Minister Jason Kenney says he’s doing Canadians a favour by restricting the number of international grunts businesses in this country can hire and installing punitive fines on  those who flout the fresh regulations. 

As CTV reports: “Under the new rules, employers in places with high unemployment rates won’t be allowed to hire temporary foreign workers in the lowest wage and skills groups in the accommodation, food service and retail sectors. Companies will also be required to re-apply each year to have low-wage TFW’s, instead of every two years. The cost of that will rise to $1,000 per employee, up from $275.”

Mr. Kenney justifies his decision in typically bellicose terms: “As opposed to being a last resort, in too many cases it’s (the TWF) become a first or only resort. . .That is unacceptable. I don’t care how tight the local labour market is, you shouldn’t be setting up a business and spending money on capital for a business if you don’t have the human capital to staff it.”

Don’t you just love the way these guys talk? 

Human beings become “human capital”, commodities that governments can and do rate and rank according to their own political exigencies and circumstances. 

At the same time, the minister in charge of labour markets doesn’t give a fig about the condition of labour markets if giving a fig means annoying a partisan base of low-end citizen workers/voters who, once their pogey runs down, can’t find sufficient numbers of mc-jobs to qualify them for another, ritualistic term of government-sanctioned, fully funded couch potatodom. How exquisitely NDP of him.

All this from a government who thinks it perfectly reasonable to lecture Atlantic Canadian provinces on their habitual use of Employment Insurance to actually sustain a labour market that backstops at least four, bone-fide seasonal industries (fishing, forestry, tourism, and agriculture).

In fact, on this subject in this country, almost no one looks good. Abuses of the system are systemic and rampant. And no government – Tory or Grit – has ever figured out a compelling, convincing, comprehensive, rational fix. 

But why should they bother? After all, no one in this country gets elected by insisting that low-wage foreign workers are only here because native-born and naturalized citizens don’t possess the skills that commercial enterprises actually need.

Have you ever worked a naan oven at 5 am in the morning? I didn’t think so. 

On the other hand, too many employers in this country work these people like virtual slaves; gaming the system at every opportunity to feather their marginal nests. As there are no federal oversights, no provincial or municipal protections that practically apply, what else would we as fine, upstanding Canucks expect?

Today, according to the Canadian Council for Refugees, “the number of migrant workers in Canada has increased by 70 per cent in the last five years. Canada has been shifting towards a reliance on migrant labour. In 2008, for the first time, the number of temporary foreign workers in Canada exceeded the total number of permanent residents admitted in the same year. At the end of 2012, the gap had grown: There were 338,189 temporary foreign workers in Canada on December 1, 2012, compared to 257,515 new permanent residents.”

Rather than revile these people publicly, we should embrace them as essential contributors to our society. Or, have we become too hardened to the plight of the world’s rootless that we have forgotten our own history?

 

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May 15 2014
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Business, Municipal Affairs

Moncton’s cultural climate change is past due

 

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The great “snow dome of 2014” across the street from this fine rabbit warren of esteemed scribblers and other ink-stained wretches has all but vanished – proof, perhaps, that when Moncton wants to get things done, it does so in a more convincing fashion than any other city of its size in Canada. 

Here, even the weather cooperates, eventually.

Of course, what’s now emerging, as the ice melts, is the vast, crumbling parking lot that once belonged to the now vacant Highfield Square – a testament either to unrealized potential or dereliction of duty, depending on how the municipal cards fall over the next few months. 

In our bones, we Monctonians know that the greater metropolitan area needs, nay deserves, a new multi-purpose events and entertainment centre. We’ve been thinking about it for decades, talking about it for years. After all, it only makes sense.

A facility with suitable amenities and capacity (the sweet spot is between 9,000 and 12,000 seats) would generate, according to reputable estimates, between $12 and $15 million in annual spending and attract between 317,000 and 396,000 people to the downtown core, where 18,000 souls already work, thousands more reside and hundreds of shops, cafés, bistros, and restaurants operate under seasonably variable circumstances. A downtown centre would, quite simply, anchor these opportunities year round.

Those few among us who still cling to the proposition that Moncton is at its best when it’s flat on its back romanticize adversity to maniacally absurd dimensions. A turtle dies when it can’t turn over, when it can’t move. And Moncton is no turtle. 

Mayor George LeBlanc’s state of the city address earlier this week was instructive. In it, he reminded his Chamber of Commerce and Rotary Club audiences that a centre will cost $100 million, give or take, and that “we have to get it right. Let’s go big or stay home.”

He also pointed out, according to a report in this newspaper that, “for the first time, the city reached more than $400 million in tourist dollars spent last year – $409 million, to be exact. Moncton saw 1.65 million visitors in 2013, which outperformed all of the Maritime cities by about 20 per cent. LeBlanc reiterated the city’s stance on a hotel levy which would need to be regulated by the province. It would aid the infrastructure spending needed to attract even more tourists to the city.”

What’s more, “LeBlanc touched on the fact that the city saw an average of about $500,000 in new construction spending a day with 2013’s total building permits issued and reminded those at the meeting that Moncton was named best place to do business in all of North America – not once but twice, referring to 2012’s and 2013’s KPMG cost-competitive ratings.”

These are not the indicators of a city that resigns itself to second- or third-rate status in the nation’s municipal cosmos. 

Moncton’s civic boosters (and I am one of them) have routinely trotted out that old trope that we “punch above our weight class.” It’s a phrase that always plays well in the center of the country, where condescending attitudes about small cities insulates citizens in the megalopolis from the truth about their obligations to the rest of us. Good for us, they say; just as long as we look after our own problems, as we orphans in this Constitution must. 

I wonder if we, in this distinctly unpromising corner of of the nation, should adopt any spin-managed message to represent ourselves to the world. Our economic development record in Moncton speaks for itself. Our community is as diverse and vibrant as any other in this country. We have been, and continue to be, the masters of our own fortunes – the true “hub”’of economic adventure, of enterprise, in New Brunswick. 

That we should honour this by enhancing it with a sparkling, glittering, ridiculously busy downtown core is, frankly, a no-brainer. It’s in our civic DNA. It’s our customary right of passage through the chaos of economic and social dislocation elsewhere in New Brunswick. 

It is time to move our municipal conscience forward, before another deep winter buries us in ice, before our hearts finally fail to melt the “snow dome” that threatens to take up permanent residence where culture deserves to triumph.

 

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Mar 17 2014
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Business, Economy, Government

A two-step made for New Brunswick’s forests

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The twinned announcements last week of a new provincial forestry strategy and a massive series of plant upgrades at J.D. Irving (JDI) Limited’s flagship pulp mill is a textbook example of how government and industry should execute a minuet – with slow, metered steps calibrated to the economic rhythm of the times.

Of course, the dance Premier David Alward’s Progressive Conservatives and JDI are presently performing to generally enthusiastic and receptive audiences – who perceive the dawn of a new day for, arguably, the province’s most important commercial sector – is not without its critics.

Some conservationists in the province are outraged that the Department of Natural Resources’ new strategy boosts the size of the total allowable softwood harvest on Crown land to four million cubic feet a year (about a 20 per cent increase from the current allocation).

“I’m shocked,” Graham Forbes, a forestry professor at the University of New Brunswick, told the CBC last week following the government announcement. “The reduction of the amount of protected land to 23 per cent (from 28 per cent) is not what we could call sustainable forest management. It’s an abject fail. It’s not sustainable.”

Even some industry players have cast a slightly jaundiced eye over the plan.

“We are guardedly optimistic,” Mike O’Blenis, vice-president of the New Brunswick Forest Products Association, told the Telegraph-Journal last week. He had been hoping – vainly, it’s now clear – for an increase in the hardwood allocation. Still, he said, “the devil is in the details. . .There is a lot of detail that has to be worked through with government and with stakeholders to put this plan into place and it is going to take some time for all that detail to come out.”

Still, what’s clear is that JDI’s announced $450-million modernization program (part of a bigger $513-million investment program at the company) for its west Saint John pulp mill will crate hundreds of new and badly needed jobs in the province over the next two years.

What’s also indisputable is that the upgrades (all of them privately financed) are tied directly to the provincial government’s decision to increase the amount of wood available to commercial harvesting. This pledge, according to Jim Irving, co-CEO of JDI, is crucial because, as he said at the announcement, “our ability to to invest and grow jobs depends on the certainty of the competitive wood supply. . .Premier, you’ve got our commitment, and I can tell you the JDI team will deliver.”

This is no mean feat at a time when governments across the western world appear either unable or unwilling to leverage the public resources they control to generate durable, measurable and responsible regional industrial benefits for everyone.

According to the New Brunswick Forest Products Association’s web site, “forestry has been the cornerstone of the New Brunswick economy for decades. More than 20,000 families are supported by the. . .sector. With more than 11,600 people directly working in forestry related jobs, our people produce 30 per cent of total manufacturing output (in) the province.”

Other facts, courtesy of the Association, include the $1 billion in salaries forest sector employees earned in 2010. Moreover, “as of 2010, the sector directly contributed just over five percent to the provincial GDP. At 5.1 per cent, that makes the forest products industry in New Brunswick more important to the provincial economy than in all other provinces in Canada. Total direct GDP in 2010 for the forest products sector was an estimated $1.4 billion in current dollars. The industry has significant indirect GDP multipliers of between 0.5 and more than 1.0 depending on the area of activity. Including direct and indirect effects, the GDP in 2010 was between $2.2 billion and $2.5 billion.”

And yet, for all of this, the sector has endured exceptionally tough years. Over the past decade, the number of milling operations in the province has dropped by 60 per cent. Since 2008, the number of jobs have dropped by 50 per cent.

Apart from the predictable criticisms about the relationships between governments and industries – that they either go too far or not far enough – last week’s twinned announcements demonstrates that in New Brunswick, of all places, government and industry can face the music together as productive dance partners.

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Mar 08 2014
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Business, Economy, Municipal Affairs

Municipal miracle 2.0 *

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The price of prosperity is, as Ben Champoux might say, eternal vigilance; which tends to explain why the trim, energetic chief executive officer of Enterprise Greater Moncton sits in his office in the city’s downtown core pouring over audio files from a recent blue-chip conference on the municipal region’s commercial future.

There is much to review: Twenty-eight hours of taped discussions among participants to 14 sectoral plenaries. “There is no way we are going to wait another 20 years to do an economic summit,” he says without a hint of weariness. “In the meantime, we need to know what specific initiatives will help us keep the momentum going right now. How do we keep the channels of communication open?”

It’s fair to say that keeping the channels of communications open was the overriding preoccupation of the 2014 Greater Moncton Economic Summit, themed “One Region, one Vision”, which convened at the warm oasis of the city’s Delta Beausejour Hotel on the frigid night, morning and afternoon of January 16 and 17. There, 340 heavy hitters, representing all socio-economic segments of the Moncton-Riverview-Dieppe tri-city area (population: 138,000) gathered to ponder their fortunes together if not, explicitly, to avert catastrophe.

“The whole point of the summit was to be proactive,” Champoux explains. “Greater Moncton has been on the upswing for many years. But we just can’t rest on our laurels. In this sense, alone, we were just blown away by the community. We had leaders from every walk of life – business, politics, education, culture – demonstrating the maturity and wisdom to say, ‘Let’s not wait until we are against the wall; let’s come together and celebrate our success and, most importantly, let’s redefine who we are today where we want to be 20-25 years from now and figure out how are we going to get there.’”

Aldéa Landry concurs. She’s a Moncton lawyer and businesswoman and a former cabinet minister and deputy premier of New Brunswick in the Liberal government of Frank McKenna. A summit participant and presenter, she thinks the timing of the event was sublimely strategic. “Change happens so fast, if you don’t move forward, you are vulnerable,” she says. “I think that the more we do this sort of thing in a serene manner, the better able we are to avoid a crisis. We are further ahead. If you wait for a crisis, you have to do a lot of crisis management. We don’t have to do that now. We can build with fewer day-to-day pressures to make things happen right away.”

Still, Greater Moncton had to learn its lesson the hard way.

The first summit of this kind convened 25 years ago when the extended municipality faced the sort of wretched economic woes that now routinely topple mid-sized cities across North America. As Moncton Mayor George LeBlanc outlined in his message to the “One Region, One Vision” conference, “In the late 80s, Moncton was at a crossroads. Significant employers and industry had left town, jobs were lost and windows were boarded up.”

Specifically, in the 1980s, Greater Moncton lost its raison d’etre when the Canadian National Railway shuttered its locomotive shops, effectively ending more than a century of steady economic growth. The 1989 summit, called as an emergency meeting to literally re-conjure the local economy, began the arduous process of establishing new commercial edifices and diversifying the labour market. A followup convention five years later sealed the deal – a wholly made-in-Moncton series of solutions that relied, crucially, on private-sector engagement.

As LeBlanc writes, “Greater Moncton came together and reinvented itself. That effort began what became known as the Moncton Miracle – the resurgence of a community that became a leader in economic development and growth.”

It’s still a leader in New Brunswick. As the province struggles overall with mounting annual deficits, longterm debt, stubbornly high unemployment in rural areas, and a virtually stagnant GDP, Greater Moncton is the one indisputably bright spot.

With a 9.7 per cent growth rate between 2006 and 2011, the City of Moncton is the fifth-fastest growing Census Metropolitan Area in the country. Its annual unemployment rate is one of the lowest in the Atlantic region and substantially below the national average.

Over the past three decades, the population of Dieppe has more than quadrupled (up by more than 25 per cent since 2006, alone). Meanwhile, Riverview has enjoyed a 20 per cent hike in its population  since 1986.

Indeed, Moncton, Riverview and Dieppe display all the metrics of eminently livable, dynamic centers: Booming, yet still affordable, housing markets, comparatively low unemployment rates, comparatively high participation rates, robust retail sectors and plentiful recreational and cultural amenities.

For these reasons and others, a recurring theme at the “One Region, One Vision” Summit was securing Greater Moncton’s position as an economic engine not merely for the immediate urban region but for the entire province. Don Mills, chairman and chief executive officer of Corporate Research Associates and conference presenter, thinks the fit is perfect. During his lengthy address on the Atlantic economy and Greater Moncton’s role, he pointed enthusiastically to the city’s resiliency.

“Moncton should be the model for many, many communities across the region,” he says. “Too many are looking for someone else to solve their problems. They are always looking especially to the federal government or the provincial government instead of taking on the responsibility themselves. . .That’s what the Moncton example shows. . .Here is a community that has been prepared to deal with the issues and try to come up with its own solutions.”

None of which is to suggest that Greater Moncton doesn’t face challenges. Employment growth is beginning to slow, a reflection, to some extent, of systemically soft conditions in the province’s export sector. Other issues that arose during the summit’s working sessions included: A growing skills shortage for high-wage jobs; inadequate appreciation within the community of the competitive advantages of its bilingual workforce; and the perception of foot-dragging on plans to rejuvenate the downtown core with a multi-use events centre, a facility that Moncton economic development consultant David Campbell has estimated could annually attract between 317,000 and 396,000 people and generate between $12 and $15 million in spending.

For Ben Champoux and others behind the summit, knowing the challenges is just as important as appreciating the opportunities. “The work for Enterprise Greater Moncton starts today,” he says. “The summit really came from a wind of change in the community. There will be a report that summarizes the essence of the Summit. It’s about gathering all the information to see where we are, what we need to do and how we can proceed together.”

For now, at any rate, it’s back to work. After all, those audio files full of good ideas and brave, new notions won’t transcribe themselves.

* This piece originally appeared in Atlantic Business Magazine‘s March/April issue

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Mar 07 2014
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Business, Economy

Should New Brunswick become Legoland?

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My grandsons are hopelessly, faithfully, determinedly in love with a little Danish block that appeared almost a century ago in the workshop of Ole Kirk Khristiansen.

As the story goes, faithfully recounted by Wikipedia (surely, by now, we may trust the source), “in 1916, Khristiansen purchased a woodworking shop in Billund which had been in business since 1895. The shop mostly helped construct houses and furniture, and had a small staff of apprentices.”

Naturally, of course, “the workshop burned down in 1924 when a fire ignited some wood shavings” – the kind of misadventure that literally prescribed the fortunes of post-industrial, small-time manufacturing operations the world over at that time.

But good old Ole Kirk was made of stern stuff. First, he built “a larger workshop, and worked towards expanding his business.” Then, when the ‘Dirty Thirties’ settled in, he decided to “focus on smaller projects (and) began producing miniature versions of his products as design aids. It was these miniature models of stepladders and ironing boards that inspired him to begin producing toys.”

And, so, Lego was born.

These days, thanks to my grandsons and millions of other grandsons and granddaughters (and parents and uncles and aunts and, yes, grandparents), the brand is riding high on a global marketing tidal wave.

This is from reporter Katie Hope, writing for cityam.com the other day:

“Lego yesterday laid out its plans to dominate the world toy market after revealing sales for last year that trumped the general market. The Danish maker of colourful toy bricks, already the world’s second largest toymaker after barbie-maker Mattel, said it expected to continue to grab market share. The popularity of its city range, which features police and firemen as well as its China toy tribe of animal warriors, helped to drive sales up 11 per cent in 2013, outperforming the global toy market which fell slightly in value.

“Net profit at the firm rose nine per cent to 6.1bn (£673m) kroner from 5.6bn in 2012. . .Revenues rose 10 per cent to 25.4bn kroner. . .It said it now employed 180 designers across 24 different countries as the group’s ‘creative core’, charged with creating new products. Lego’s popularity means that on average each person on Earth owns around 86 of its bricks.”

Actually, I own about 450 pieces from the 1960s. I won’t hazard a formal inventory of my nephew’s horde, but I imagine his collection now tops 10,000. My legacy boys, Euan and James, are beneficiaries of the extended family’s generosity.

But I wonder whether there’s a broader benefit to be extracted from all of this – an example that Denmark sets for debt and deficit-laden New Brunswick. Indeed, is there one for all of Atlantic Canada?

To what depth of ingenuity – apart from the technology required to exploit our natural resources – have we in this region of Canada plumbed to invigorate our entrepreneurial class of decidedly home-grown producers and job-generators?

It’s true, we have the great family firms who employ thousands of people. In the Maritimes, alone, the names Irving, McCain, Sobeys, Bragg and Jodrey lay testament to   a vigorous form of private enterprise that stands the test of time.

Still, what of the future? Where are the new brands consecrated by, even reconstituted from, the old ones?

Lego has effectively reinvented itself at its birthplace in northern Europe. It continues to provide jobs there as it expands, like a juggernaut, everywhere else. Its secret is simple, or so it says for itself on its website:

“Curiosity asks, ‘Why?’ and imagines explanations or possibilities. . .Playfulness asks ‘What if?’ and imagines how the ordinary becomes extraordinary, fantasy or fiction. Dreaming it is a first step towards doing it. Free play is how children develop their imagination – the foundation for creativity. . .Creativity is the ability to come up with ideas and things that are new, surprising and valuable.”

Dreaming it is a first step towards doing it? Creativity is the ability to come up with ideas and things that are new, surprising and valuable?

Yes, that’s what my grandsons will say as they build their plastic spires into the imaginary sky.

Shall we ask any less of ourselves in the world we call real?

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Mar 03 2014
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Business, Economy

Flying the costly skies in Atlantic Canada

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It’s one of those questions for the ages – right up there with “Why is the sky blue?” and “How is it that Rob Ford is still alive?”

Why does it cost so much more to fly from Halifax to St. John’s than it does to fly from Halifax to Toronto?

Given the distances and the presumed cost of fuel, it seems counterintuitive. More than that. To at least one regional newspaper, it seems downright scandalous, especially in this penny-pinching, expense-scrutinizing age of so-called government accountability.

“A list of travel and hospitality expenses claimed by Liberal members of Parliament . . .show Gerry Byrne spent $21,470.22 and Judy Foote tallied $22,131.68 and Yvonne Jones claimed $24,590.22 from Oct. 1 to Dec. 31, 2013,” the Corner Brook Western Star’s lead editorial last Wednesday observed.

Are these excessive? The editorialist does not venture an opinion. He or she does, however, declare “The cost of air travel to and from Newfoundland is excessive and the cost for Labradorians to fly anywhere is outrageous.

“If any partisan pencil pushers are inclined to pick through the expenses of Liberal MPs looking for political ammunition, maybe they could also mount an investigation into why it costs almost as much to fly to St. john’s from this region as it does to fly from Halifax to Vancouver.”

I, for one, am glad he or she asked. I happen to have an answer. Sort of.

A while ago, bugged to near distraction by this conundrum, I did a little digging. According to Monette Pasher, executive director of the Atlantic Canada Airports Association, “Pricing is often a result of market demand and competition. . .There are over ten flights a day offered from Moncton to Toronto by three air carriers. From Moncton to Halifax there are four flights a day offered by one carrier.”

What’s more, she said, the cost competitiveness issue is not restricted to Atlantic Canada; it’s actually a national problem, though it may be more prevalent along the East Coast. Here, she noted, “U.S. airports are in close proximity. . .You see the low-cost carriers in the U.S. and they are setting up services at the border to attract Canadians who will travel for cheaper fares.”

In fact, according to her estimates, this country is losing five million Canadian passengers to the U.S. every year. That equates to $1.3 billion in lost Canadian GDP and $200 million in lost tax revenue.

For Atlantic Canada, the issue is clearly a personal economic concern. “While we have a relatively modest population base of 2.3 million people, we welcome over five million visitors to our region every year, which makes tourism an important sector in the economic generator in Atlantic Canada,” Keith Collins and David Innes, the CEOs of the St. John’s International Airport and Fredericton International Airport, respectively, told Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications not long ago.

“Our 14 airports move more than 6.5 million passengers per year, which is three times the total population of the region. That number has grown by an average of five per cent annually since 2002. We are not only moving passengers and cargo in and out of Atlantic Canada; we are enabling the growth of our local economies. Our airports together generate over $2.6 billion in economic activity every year, supporting just under 17,000 person years of employment and over $500 million in wages alone.”

There may be solutions, however. “The maritime airports have worked together with Air Canada’s business sales team to develop a more convenient approach to business travel in the region,” Ms. Pasher reported. “In 2012, they created the Halifax Commuter Flight Pass, which allows for consistent pricing for air travel between many Maritime cities and Halifax.

“You can select one traveller or business and it will give you options and cost for packages. This gives a business traveller a set cost to travel by air between a number of Atlantic Canada cities and Halifax. It works out to $245 for a one way flight credit for a single traveller.”

Not bad. Still, my travel consultant just booked me on a Moncton-Toronto return for three-hundred bucks, taxes in.

The fact is, until more competition crowds the costly skies, we’re stuck paying through the nose for regional air travel. And, unlike Mr. Byrne and company, we can’t pass along the cost to the taxpayers as, well. . .they would be us.

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Feb 28 2014
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Business, Security, Society

Who’s your daddy, now?

Hello Big Daddy!

If we read our digital propaganda correctly, then we should all be over the moon after learning that a fresh day dawns on the global circuitry that tracks our every move, intentions and even aspirations.

Welcome, fellow plebes, to the era of big claims and big mouths – to the age of ‘Big Daddy’ (also known as Big Data), with all of its magnificent liens on our vanishing sense of privacy.

Mindless of any threat, existential or otherwise, Big Daddy’s acolytes were front and centre-stage this week in Saint John extolling the virtues of collecting, parsing, analyzing, and recruiting – in the service of capitalist enterprises and nosey governments – our personal information.

On the occasion of Big Data Congress II in New Brunswick’s port city, local show promoter Marc Fraser (executive vice-president of T4G) effused, “It’s about the phenomena that we have here in Atlantic Canada, which is being able to continually punch above our weight when it comes to technical capability and entrepreneurial capability.”

Not ready to be outmatched in the time-honoured craft of cliche production (reader note: no big data required for that particular exercise) T4G’s president Geoff Flood offered this bromide: “It’s all about understanding the opportunity to use Big Data to change the world, improve businesses and build opportunities right here.”

Not for nothing, but who are they kidding?

The phrase, ‘Big Data’, has been slinking around the edges of the Internet since before the George W. Bush administration declared war on the wrong Middle Eastern country in 2003 (thank you Big-Daddy CIA and NSA miners for completely missing the point of your 15 minutes of fame).

The fact is almost no one knows what to do with these petabytes of information on everything from my ridiculous love affair with slim jeans readily available at the Moncton outlet of The Gap to ex-spy-in-exile Edward Snowdon’s rather more substantial revelations about spooks, creeps and authorized assassins of world peace.

Still, the official, meaningless bafflegab spills from the mouths of the babes we elect to purportedly represent us with, at least, some modicum of intelligent reflection. Oh dear, what was that you were saying Premier David Alward to Big Daddy Congress Part Deux the other night? Something about “collaboration and co-ordination”, perhaps?

As it happens, that’s the last thing your audience wants. And unless you’ve figured out a way to use Big Data to rescue the province from its impending fiscal doom, it’s the last thing you should want either.

In fact, there is almost nothing about this phenomenon – this gargantuan belch of information collected and floating in the electronic stratosphere – that lends itself to fair, egalitarian or democratic purpose.

“Big data. It’s the latest IT buzzword, and it isn’t hard to see why,” writes John Jordan in an October 2013 edition of the Wall Street Journal. “The ability to parse more information, faster and deeper, is allowing companies, governments, researchers and others to understand the world in a way they could only dream about before.”

But, he says, (and it’s a big but), “Big data. . .introduces high stakes to the data-analytics game. There’s a greater potential for privacy invasion, greater financial exposure in fast-moving markets, greater potential for mistaking noise for true insight, and a greater risk of spending lots of money and time chasing poorly defined problems or opportunities. . .Unless we understand, and deal with, these challenges, we risk turning all that data from something that has the potential to enhance our organizations into a diversion, an illusion or a paralyzing turf battle.”

Or worse.

Consider Cindy Waxer’s reporting in Computer World a year ago. “Hip clothing retailer Urban Outfitters is facing a class-action lawsuit for allegedly violating consumer protection laws by telling shoppers who pay by credit card that they had to provide their ZIP codes – which is not true – and then using that information to obtain the shoppers’ addresses,” she wrote.

“Facebook is often at the center of a data privacy controversy, whether it’s defending its own enigmatic privacy policies or responding to reports that it gave private user data to the National Security Agency (NSA). And the story of how retail behemoth Target was able to deduce that a teenage shopper was pregnant before her father even knew is the stuff of marketing legend.”

Big Daddy, to satisfy your insatiable appetite, how creepy must our lives finally become?

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