N.B. Economy Does Not Need To Be ‘Saved’
The University of New Brunswick (UNB) is creating the JDI Roundtable on Manufacturing Competitiveness to build on the province’s core strengths – not to save the economy as many people might think, at least the ones who read the story Can anything save New Brunswick? in MacLean’s in March 2016.
Dr. Herb Emery was one of those people before he moved here in July of 2016 to become the Vaughan Chair in Regional Economics.
“[The MacLean’s article] came out right around the time I accepted the position here, so everyone was sending it to me,” said Emery in an interview Monday. “It distorted how I was thinking about the province when I arrived. I believed that there would be some basic things you could get going and reinvigorate.
“What I’ve learned now that I’ve been here three years is that the article was so wrong because it’s based on a statistical picture of a province. If you really look at what’s happened in New Brunswick, everything in the south along highway 2 is a full-employment economy. The reason no one can save it is it doesn’t need saving.”
In fact, Emery says the province weathered the economic downturn after 2008 better than most places, including our neighbours in the U.S. northeast. The manufacturing sector employed 28,000 in 2013 (fluctuating between a monthly low in October 2012 of 26,300 and a high of 30,500 in February 2015) and accounted for $2.9-million in real GDP for the province.
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He says the province needs to leverage that strength to stimulate further growth.
“It’s really remarkable in terms of how much manufacturing is here and the fact that we didn’t suffer the same losses as the rest of the developed world,” he said. “That should be signalling to us that there are opportunities. When everyone else was losing we held fast. When everything starts to grow again we should be able to take advantage of that.”
Emery is the chair of the new roundtable on manufacturing competitiveness, which he says will be an integral, high-profile and ongoing component of the new Atlantic Institute for Policy Research (AIPR) at UNB.
He says the roundtable will take a closer look at why the manufacturing sector hasn’t continued to grow, even though it held its own during the downturn.
“It will focus discussion on big-picture issues and structures of the regional economy to better understand why the region has struggled to grow and what we can do to change that course,” said Emery.
An advisory group, with representatives from academia, industry and the New Brunswick Business Council, will provide strategic support for the program, with Emery building a research team to support its objectives.
The Roundtable will be an annual forum that brings together global thought leaders and regional stakeholders to address the challenges facing manufacturers, particularly those affecting New Brunswick and the Maritimes. The first forum will be held September 26 at the Fredericton Convention Centre.
The theme for the inaugural forum is “Manufacturing Competitiveness as a Foundation for Building a Better New Brunswick.”
It will address three topic areas:
- The traditional strength of manufacturing in New Brunswick, the post-2008 decline, and what manufacturing needs to come back.
- The reasons for the low level of private sector investment in the province and what can be done to reinvigorate this economic driver.
- Labour supply and labour shortages.
“We’re trying to create a forum where if you have a goal of growing the economy and growing the GDP, creating more jobs, getting more investment, you want to have a forum where you talk about specific sectors where we think there’s a lot of opportunities to stimulate that growth,” said Emery. “We want to do it in a way where we present facts and figures and what we think it points to in terms of policy options…Get a conversation going, hopefully identifying things a government can do to make things better.”
Emery says there are plenty of critical issues to address in terms of improving the province’s competitive position.
“There has been an outcry over WorkSafe premiums. The government’s working on that but they might not go far enough,” he said. “We have to figure out what we’re going to do around energy costs because most manufacturers require sizable amounts of energy…We have uncertainty over governments wanting to tax machinery and equipment, or even talking about it when no other province is. Infrastructure is crumbling – what do we need to invest in and where?”
The goal, says Emery, is to create an investment climate where everyone can grow their businesses, not create unfair advantages for one over the other.
“We are not trying to pick winners,” he said. “We’re looking for things that improve competitiveness in all producers in a sector. We’re looking for the win-win at this point.”
J.D. Irving, Limited, is contributing $2-million to help cover the costs of the roundtable’s activities.