N.B. Needs A ‘More Muscular’ Plan For Economic Development
David Campbell is a Moncton-based economic development consultant and co-host of the Huddle podcast, Insights. The following piece was originally published on his blog, It’s the Economy, Stupid!, on Substack.
This is likely to enrage my Insights podcast co-host Don Mills, who has openly questioned why there are so many different organizations and government departments associated with economic development in the region.
I have some sympathy with his position but my line in the sand is that you must have the capacity to properly identify and develop economic opportunities in all regions of your province. For me, that could theoretically be done by one or a hundred organizations.
I want to reiterate that I am not talking about what many people think of when they define “economic development.” I’m not talking about funding programs to encourage companies to expand, nor am I talking about business counselling services. I’m not even talking about marketing and promoting communities in some generic way (like a bland ‘we are the best!’).
I’m talking about identifying those opportunities that hold potential for investment and then working with industry to assess the opportunity, build a value proposition, and then go out and hustle to attract entrepreneurs and companies to leverage that opportunity.
This ranges from the micro–attracting a physiotherapist to Chipman so that people do not have to commute to Fredericton for that service–to the large scale, like a billion-dollar mining project in the region.
These opportunities are usually built around some specific asset, attribute, or existing cluster of activity: a university R&D centre, for example, or a tungsten deposit.
Ontario recently set up a new initiative “to encourage the development, protection, and commercialization of intellectual property in the province”. Technically, they set up a whole new agency.
It started with a question: why does Canada generate so little IP relative to the U.S.? That led to a political promise, followed by a panel to study the issue and, finally, a new agency – IP Ontario – to be far more deliberate about translating research into commercializable products.
This brings me back to the number of “economic development” organizations. If you need some specific, targeted organizations to do something like this, I say “giddy up.”
When we set up the energy opportunities development corp between NB Power and the Government of New Brunswick, I thought it would pursue and develop a range of energy projects, including fostering energy-related startups, SMRs, export-focused renewable energy, export-focused smart grid projects, and more.
In some alternate universe, NB Power-affiliated experts would have been consulting on smart grid deployments around the world.
It turned out that corp was only meant to be a vehicle for channeling funds to support SMR development and I was ultimately disappointed.
But, if you need specialized teams to develop specific opportunities, don’t be shy. These could sit under an agency, such as ONB (think CyberNB before it was cut loose) or could be standalone (think NBIF or BioNB). But if they have a clear mandate and the ability to generate a return on the taxpayer investment, why not?
For more than a decade, I have been pushing a more muscular approach to economic development. I don’t go as far as Mariana Mazzucato, as she wants far more government control over the economy. I just want government and partners with a vested interest to be aggressively looking at opportunities from one end of the province to the other.
But, for me, the goal is to catalyze private sector investment with relatively little taxpayer investment. Once the opportunity is clearly identified and the government has made investments to strengthen the value proposition, then we sell the heck out of the place to related entrepreneurs and firms.
So, in the end, we could end up with even more economic development organizations, but also much better results.
Huddle publishes commentaries from groups and individuals on important business issues facing the Maritimes. These commentaries do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Huddle. To submit a commentary for consideration, contact editor Mark Leger: [email protected].