In Praise Of ‘Scrappy’ Entrepreneurs
Mark Leger is the editor and part-owner of Huddle. This is a weekly column that features opinion, analysis and reflections on Huddle stories, podcasts and business news in the region.
A couple of times during the pandemic, I’ve connected with a group of university friends on video calls. Honestly, they’ve felt like mini-reunions where I compare notes on how we’re all doing, and it feels like I’m off the grid. One of them lives in New York City and writes for major magazines; one works in Toronto for a national newspaper and another works for CBC in Ottawa.
They work for Canadian and U.S. media outlets that are national and international in scope and live in major urban centres, so their worlds are familiar and of interest to me. They can find Saint John on the map, but the Maritime-centred events and issues covered in Huddle are alien to them. They are in the centres of the universe; I am in the outer reaches.
They don’t see me or the place I live in this way, of course; it’s a projection of my own insecurities. These guys know I live in a cool place and have had great work opportunities in the 25 years since I left Toronto. I try to be good-humoured about my small-town hang-ups; my overly earnest attempts to talk up the Maritimes reminding me of Al Franken’s character from the Saturday Night Live skit “Daily Affirmations” from 30 years ago. Stuart Smalley was the host of a mock self-help show and he began each episode by looking into the mirror and saying, “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me…”
Now, I admit, I’m having a bit of fun, exaggerating the extent of my feelings of inadequacy. But I think there’s some truth there; that Atlantic Canadians like me are never sure how we measure up against people in more competitive, crowded national or international markets.
I was reflecting on my chats with my friends and how they made me feel as I listened to the latest Huddle “Insights” podcast with David Campbell and Don Mills. They’re doing a series of episodes on economic growth in each of the four Atlantic provinces. The first one, “Why P.E.I. is the economic star in Atlantic Canada,” features a conversation with former premier Wade MacLauchlan about why the province is leading the way on population and GDP growth.
Podcast: Why P.E.I. is the economic star in Atlantic Canada
During a thoughtful and interesting chat, MacLauchlan referred to the “scrappiness” of the P.E.I. business and community leaders that secured federal funding in the early 2000s to help launch an aerospace sector on the former site of CFB Summerside that has become an Atlantic Canadian success story. There were no “Stuart Smalleys” insecure about how they measured up to their urban cousins in Halifax and Moncton.
MacLauchlan says proponents of the Slemon Park initiative made their case for funding from the Atlantic Investment Partnership based on the value proposition, which federal officials could have overlooked in favour of the larger urban centres in the region.
“It looked like P.E.I was going to get a couple of computers over in the corner so we could find out what was going on in Halifax and Moncton,” says MacLauchlan. “We weren’t all that crazy about that kind of distribution of things. [But] we never, ever said, ‘we’re after our fair share.’ We said, ‘we’re going to show you that we can do this, and not only that, but we can show you a success story that you’re not going to have without us.’”
MacLauchlan says there have been many other successes as well, pointing to a biosciences sector with around 60 companies and thousands of jobs. He says the P.E.I. economy added 8,500 full-time jobs between 2015-19 and saw a 27 percent growth in manufacturing, the highest rate in the country, something that might surprise people who don’t expect economic leadership to emanate from a small island.
“Prince Edward Island may not be the place that people would say was going to show the rest of the country that manufacturing was still in fashion,” he says.
“I think it’s scrappiness more than resilience that people growing the economy have in Prince Edward Island.”
The Island also has ambitious and innovative entrepreneurs, he says.
“If it weren’t for one person, Regis Duffy, I don’t think Prince Edward Island would have much of a biosciences sector,” says MacLauchlan. “He started 50 years ago, as a chemistry professor, looking to find summer jobs for his students to mix a few kilos of dye. That evolved … into what became both DCL (now Sekisui) and BioVectra, between the two of them they would employ close to 700 people.”
This has been a common theme on many Huddle podcasts over the past year – entrepreneurs that successfully compete on a global stage from small cities and towns in Atlantic Canada: K.C. Irving; the founders of Radian6 and Q1 Labs; Tareq Hadhad of Peace By Chocolate; Bryana Ganong of Ganong; Jennifer Wagner of CarbonCure; and John Bragg of Oxford Frozen Foods and Eastlink. They have all faced challenges characteristic of small regions around worker attraction and retention and access to investment capital. But none of that has prevented the ambitious and innovative people behind the companies from succeeding in globally competitive industries from their Atlantic bases.
I would do well to channel their confidence, and not my inner “Stuart Smalley” who deep down isn’t sure he measures up. As MacLauchlan said reflecting on the challenges Atlantic Canadian companies will face coming out of the pandemic, “Let’s never forget the scrappiness.”
Feedback? E-mail: [email protected].
Banner photo: Wade MacLauchlan. Image: submitted.