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Site Selection Special Feature
by Renée Haines
Across the vast and often spectacular lands and seascapes of Atlantic Canada, visitors to what once was considered a far frontier are now finding themselves at the forefront of the emerging global economy.
North America's northeastern corner has become the continent's busiest new international connection to emerging technologies and trade opportunities, thanks to new business and political developments rapidly changing the region's economic scope and future direction.
"Atlantic Canada has a private sector more aggressive and more dynamic than anything I've seen in the past 25 years," said James McNiven, a former president of the Atlantic Provinces Economic Council who now is chairman and CEO of Halifax-based Business Development Information Inc.
A change in mindset is behind this surge in activity, said McNiven, also a professor of public and business administration at Dalhousie University in Halifax. A region still heavily dependent on traditional natural resource industries found itself forced to diversify its economy to provide more jobs in an area that began to suffer, as did the rest of Canada, during the recent years of federal spending and jobs cutbacks.
"Then came the realization that there had to be a change in attitude toward technology," McNiven said. "Five or six years ago, it was seen simply as a threat to a resource-based economy. Then governments began to look at technology to generate more employment. That's a tremendous change in attitude."
Today, all four Atlantic Canada provinces are aggressively courting technology jobs, from Newfoundland and Labrador, to New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. They are also providing their residents the higher levels of skills needed to fill those jobs at a pace that is attracting growing interest not only from technology sectors, but from manufacturers and other employers also looking for a smarter work force base.
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"There's a lot of good things coming out of this correction of financial overspending in the past," McNiven said, including innovative public/private partnerships such as the one that led to the building of the Confederation Bridge to Prince Edward Island that opened to traffic in June. "This was the first real public/private infrastructure partnership in Canada, so it's been watched very, very closely," he said.
McNiven also cited the creation of the Greater Halifax Partnership in Nova Scotia. "What is different is that it was a real first for this end of Canada in terms of bringing together the private sector and economic development agencies. It required a big change of thought, and it's working and showing the way for a lot of other people," he said. |
In an increasingly global economy, a far corner of North America now finds itself more centrally located as an Atlantic Trade Rim gateway with expanding east-west trade ties via its many seaports and growing air travel connections to improving economies in Europe and beyond.
The North American Free Trade Agreement, which has erased many trade barriers among Canada, the United States and Mexico, has made Atlantic Canada a business beachhead for new north-south trade ties with NAFTA countries and beyond to South America. "International firms are looking at Atlantic Canada as a gateway into NAFTA," said Francis MacKenzie, vice president and general manager of the Greater Halifax Partnership.
And, with a global economy increasingly relying on information technology, which measures success by computer access rather than by miles on a map, Atlantic Canada finds itself at a new advantage with one of the more advanced computing and telecommunications infrastructures in North America already in place.
Atlantic Canada, site of North America's first commercial test of high-speed data transmission lines known as ISDN, also boasts the first province or state in North America -- New Brunswick -- to have a fully digitized telephone network. Indeed, the U.S. computer software powerhouse Microsoft found itself traveling to New Brunswick to form a partnership through its Canadian subsidiary to create an interactive "virtual campus" that will enable Canadians to tap into an international "classroom" setting to obtain the latest information technology skills. Atlantic Canada also boasts a bilingual work force that has become an important calling card for the region's growing call center sector.
| Atlantic Canada already has the largest per capita concentration of universities and institutes in the country, and is attracting new outside business and industry eager to be closer to a higher education resource boasting expanding research and commercial development centers. |
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A new film industry is also emerging at sites from Prince Edward Island to New Brunswick, involving not only major Hollywood productions but expanding local film makers capitalizing on the kind of pristine landscapes that have always proven solid tourism drivers and "quality of life" advertisements for incoming industry.
It is not surprising that Atlantic Canada, built by pioneers from around the world, has a higher annual small business start-up rate than Canada as a whole. Today these entrepreneurs are pioneering new innovations from software to food products that are attracting international attention.
Biotechnology Working Groups across the region prove just one example of support networks being formed to capitalize on new opportunities. Annual sales of Atlantic Canada's Diagnostic Chemicals Ltd. biochemical products have quadrupled in just the past five years.
Seafaring Atlantic Canada has become a leader in the emerging high technology computer mapping sector, as well as in cold ocean engineering, marine communications and the recent boom in aquaculture. Already resource rich, Atlantic Canada is about to become even richer with the enormous new deposits of offshore oil and natural gas at Hibernia and other fields just now nearing production stage. The multi-billion dollar staging projects already under construction to transport these oil and gas finds are being built with future expansion in mind for related and other heavy industry users.
What Atlantic Canada also boasts is plenty of available land and plenty of available, high-skilled workers on a continent with growing shortages of both. Atlantic Canada's provinces also average some of the lowest job turnover rates in North America. Indeed, the same quality of life that makes residents as loathe to leave as tourists is also keeping unemployment high, even in the wake of new job growth.
"As fast as you sop up the labor force, the unemployment rate stays the same because people move back. It's uncanny. People who have lived here really want to be here," McNiven said. "As a consequence, not only is the region a good place to take advantage of that labor force, but you're also likely to attract in expatriates who want to come back home to that quality of life."
The plentiful available land exists even in Atlantic Canada's urban centers, said McNiven, whose company, BDI, is a joint venture established by Nova Scotia's Dalhousie University and the European Research Center of the University of Strathclyde in Scotland to track and analyze Canadian economic development issues. "If anything, the industrial park scene has been overbuilt because every community wanted its own industrial park," McNiven said. "In any given province, there's 20 or 30 years worth of available space."
With each of Atlantic Canada's four provinces boasting its own mix of economic strengths, the competition for outside investment has "definitely become more competitive," said Mike Estabrooks, managing director of the public/private sector alliance, Connections Nova Scotia. "But competitiveness is good," he added.
"Every time we have a success in Atlantic Canada, whether it be Prince Edward Island or Nova Scotia or New Brunswick, the economic spin-off helps everyone," Estabrooks said.
Individual provinces are continuing to add their own one-on-one and province-wide incentives to Atlantic Canada's already competitive incentives for new business, especially in research and development sectors. Canada has always boasted lower cost-of-doing-business advantages compared to much of the neighboring United States, especially with the comparatively higher buying power of the Canadian dollar (now worth about 75 cents to the U.S. dollar). This spring, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Newfoundland and Labrador combined the federal goods and services tax into one, lower "harmonized" 15 percent value-added sales tax designed to simplify reporting costs and spur export activity by lowering business costs.
The new dynamics of change and competition under way in Atlantic Canada are providing the groundwork for strong economic expansion ahead, the Atlantic Provinces Economic Council recently reported in its latest outlook report for 1997 and beyond. "For the first time since 1994, the major components of the Atlantic economy are finally moving in generally the same direction," the council reported, adding, in a word, that the direction is "up."
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