Home Washington Secretariat Promoting Trade and Investment in Atlantic Canada

Promoting Trade and Investment in Atlantic Canada: Notes for Panel Discussion

Colin Robertson
Minister (Advocacy) and Head, Washington Advocacy Secretariat
Ottawa, Ontario
October 25, 2005

Too often we look at things through the wrong end of the telescope. If we took a purely ‘rational’ approach, and just relied on the ‘metrics’, Canada probably wouldn’t be. Happily, people are what make a nation and we rely on brains and blood and imagination – commodities that can’t be measured in conventional fashion.

I remember a French diplomat at the UN during my first tour of duty – it was in the preliminaries to the first referendum. He elegantly told me: “Vous n’êtes pas un nation. Vous êtes une fiction, un accident d’géographie”. He came from the Voltaire school that defined Canada as “quelques arpents de neige”.

I inelegantly replied that he was dead wrong. I reminded him that our success as a nation has strong French roots. I gave him a short history lesson about our oldest ‘Club’ now 400 year old - ‘L’ordre de bon temps’ – the Order of Good Cheer.

I told him that I was a member (thanks to Lieutenant Governor Myra Freeman), and that it is a French invention created by Samuel de Champlain during that first impossible winter in Porte Royale.

It was all about surviving in a cold climate through the art of storytelling, music, and fellowship – characteristics that still define the Maritimes and the rest of Canada. Things that you can’t monetarize! Like a nation, like a people, like ourselves…except, maybe, at tax time.

Like others in this room, I’m a graduate of the Allan MacEachen ‘graduate school’ of government. A school that puts the premium on the public good – the title of a series of essays (In Pursuit of the Public Good) edited a decade ago by Tom Kent to mark Allan J’s retirement from the Senate. They celebrated his now half century of public service. Service that all his friends are happy to note continues today.

MacEachen, a graduate of St. FX, drew deeply from the Antigonish movement and Father Moses Coady. Coady argued that the essence of a genuine community development project depended on each of becoming masters of our own destiny. Education, lifelong in his view – he put particular weight on what we’d now “pivotal actors in mass movements for social change”. Coady, like MacEachen firmly believed in three things:

• First, cooperativism to address the problems generated by market capitalism;
• Second, in the power of local community organizing to affect social reality, and
• Third, in the adequacy of peaceful, democratic means to achieve a more just and humane world.

None of this can be measured in terms of the kinds of statistics we heard yesterday. Small wonder we call economics the ‘dismal science’. And I’ve head it all before.

Years ago, I listed to a briefing of Mr. MacEachen by someone from the Economic Council. He spoke of Cape Breton and reeled off the demographics and set it against the problems of a failing fishery, an obsolete heavy water operation, a steel factory that was bankrupt, and the end of ‘King Coal’.

The conclusion, like we heard yesterday from the statisticians was that ‘the end is near’. MacEachen listened carefully but, as was his wont, said little. Later, I asked him what he thought of the briefing. He paused. Then the eagle eyes blazed and he spoke: “There is no life in statistics. This is the art of the actuary.”

And as MacEachen argued in his own essay (‘All Those Years: Practise and Purpose’) in the Kent festschrift, people matter and government matters, especially when it comes to ensuring the conditions that ‘keep bread on the table’.

Celebrate the Successes

So let’s celebrate our success and our continuing evolution from a trading nation to a nation of traders. More than 80 per cent of Atlantic Canada exports (ranging from New Brunswick at 90% to Newfoundland and Labrador at 50%) are destined for U.S. markets.

It used to be fish and lumber. Fish and lumber still matter but as I learnt when I was in Fredericton a lot of the fish we export is now ‘grown’ and then harvested from feeding pens in the Bay of Fundy. John Risley and Clearwater, are now the largest fish exporters with eight plants in Eastern Canada. Clearwater is also the largest operator of fishing vessels in the Atlantic. In Newfoundland Fisheries Deputy Mike Samson told me that the value of shellfish now eclipses that of groundfish and much of it heads not to New England but further south, to Key West and Charleston.

As for lumber. Increasingly we are further processing it within Canada.

Like the kitchen cabinets the son of my boss, Ambassador Frank McKenna, manufactures in Shediac. James McKenna, an Atlantic finalist in this year’s Ernst and Young Entrepeneur of the Year awards, sells 80% to the US market. He’s not alone. And Atlantic Canada has developed hundreds of niche industries.

Crafts like Nova Scotia Crystal on the Waterfront of Halifax Harbour where entrepreneur Denis Ryan taken the techniques from Waterford and applied them to Canada. And created a great tourist attraction at the same time.

Or Glen Breton, where Lauchie McLean has taken Cape Breton water, a dry yeast from South Africa, malt from Scotland and bourbon casks from Kentucky to make the smoothest (and only) single malt in Canada. Indeed, I was nearly late for the premiere at the Atlantic Film Festival a few years ago when I found myself just having another wee dram with Lauchie and other friends at one of Halifax’s finer establishments.

Our Entertainment

Films including miniseries like The Boys of St. Vincent and my friend Barb Doran’s Random Passage. And my favourite - Trailer Park Boys: Ricky, Julian, Bubbles, Lucy, Mr. Lahey and the rest of the cast. Created by Mike Clattenberg on location in Dartmouth. And soon to be an Ivan Reitman movie production. Look what Ivan did for Schwarzenegger.

And literature. I grew up on Hugh McLennan. And revelled recently in Alistair Macleod’s No Great Mischief and Donna Morrissey’s Kit’s Law. Who’s read my friend Leo Furey’s The Long Run.

All of this is exportable. And sustained through investments like I saw recently in Charlottetown when I visited at the Atlantic Technology Centre on University Avenue and caught up with Greta Rose. She runs Cellar Door, one of our more successful animation studios. They’ve just sold Doodlez, fifty two-minute episodes of animated shorts to Nickelodeon and Chef at home and abroad, starring Michael Smith.

And, perhaps most importantly, our music.

With a father who worked for the CBC, it is no surprise that I grew up on a diet of Marg Osbourn and Tommy Hunter on Don Messer’s Jubilee and, for radio, Max Ferguson, whose shows began with a ‘pipes and drums’ march, usually from the Halifax Tattoo, and then went straight into Maritime folk tunes, jigs, reels played on the fiddle.

I was in Sydney in late February with Myra and Larry Freeman – they set the bar for vice regal couples at the provincial level, for the East Coast Music Awards. It was like living on the set of a moving ceilah as we listened and then danced to the Barra McNeils, the Cottars, Beolach, Vishten, Samantha Robichaud and award winners Gordie Sampson and host George Canyon. And the Trews.

Music is exportable. And when I was in Cedar Rapids this summer with Senator Chuck Grassley, Natalie MacMaster was taking her fiddle up the aisles at the University of Iowa.

New Economy and Education as Service Industry

Then there is the ‘New Economy’: life sciences, hi-tech and, most importantly, education.

Canada’s first college, King’s in Halifax, has been open for two centuries. As I observed first-hand in California, learning and continuing education and research is vital to economic success. It is why California with 36 million people has a bigger economy than France with 66 million people.

Atlantic Canada’s largest university is Memorial. And, like it’s counterparts it has established itself as regional leader in engineering, ocean sciences and biomedical capabilities.

When I was in Los Angeles, Deputy Bill Thompson led the first of a delegations from New Brunswick came down to promote distance learning.

Wade will kill me if I don’t mention his baby and proud achievement: the research and development cluster and in particular the NRC Institute for Nutrisciences and Health at the University of Prince Edward Island (UPEI) on his energy-generating campus. (Wade has won three Canada Foundation for Innovation grants).

As Premier Hamm always reminds me, Nova Scotia today has 11 degree granting institutions and 13 community college campuses. More Nova Scotians, on a per capita basis, go to university than any other province in Canada. And increasingly schools in the Atlantic are not just the school of choice for Upper Canada, they are reaching out internationally.

Think of the Coady Institute at St. FX, where my friend Sean Riley, another MacEachen alumnus, is president. Did you know that at the newly minted University College of Cape Breton, John Harker, another MacEachenite, has begun to train oil workers from Nigeria and is marketing their technically based education around the world.

We can, and should, do more at marketing our schools and universities in the United States. Not only do we provide the best-value educational experience but for long-term influence, having tomorrow’s leadership class in the United States get to know Canada through their schooling will reap us huge dividends down the road.

There is, of course, a challenge associated to education.

I met in February with Don Mills, president and CEO of Corporate Research at his offices in Maritime Place, on the Halifax arm. Mills also chairs the Greater Halifax partnership and when we talked he pointed to a pair of Hi-Tech firms that were constructing offices beside his own tower. “That’s the future for Nova Scotia”, he told me, “its in industries that rely on brainpower. We’re turning out the people at our 14 universities and colleges but they can’t find jobs here so they move. We need to convince firms to come here: the costs are lower and quality of life is better.”

When I was last in Halifax I visited Brian Lee Crowley at the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies (AIMS). There is much to his idea of regional economic cooperation with an ‘Atlantica’ that encompasses New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine as well as the Gaspe. And I endorse his ‘big idea’ of a closer relationship with the US. He and the Institute are doing good and independent work around issues like infrastructure and sustainability of economic prosperity.

Trade and the Transportation Corridor

We spoke about transportation challenges.

New England is primary funnel with 60% of exports passing by truck across the border through, for example, St. Stephen and Calais, or by boat through Boston and New York. The United States is the largest foreign investor in Canada and the most popular destination for Canadian investment.

Highways are a means to an end. So is Team Canada Atlantic, a partnership of ACOA, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Industry Canada, Foreign Affairs Canada, International Trade Canada and the four Atlantic provinces.

Trade missions have been at the core of the Team Canada Atlantic approach since 1999. Nine trade missions to the New England states, Atlanta, New York, and Washington and, most recently, to Chicago in March. The next, scheduled for May, 2006 will be to Florida, Orlando and Miami. Florida, a state that has the fourth largest economy in the United States and fifteenth largest in the world.

The result? Export sales in excess of $36 million.

They have helped more than 329 Atlantic Canadian entrepreneurs to meet with nearly 2,750 buyers, agents and business owners from across the United States. Exports create one out of every three new jobs in Atlantic Canada, and for every $1 million in exports, eight to 11 full-time positions are sustained.

As my old boss Allan J. MacEachen would say: “that means bread on the table for today and for tomorrow.” And when I think of Allan J. I think of all those who have come out of Cape Breton or gone to St. FX. My boss, Frank McKenna, another ‘graduate’ of the MacEachen ‘office’, is a graduate of St. FX, and it was another St. FX graduate, Brian Mulroney, who led Canada to the Free Trade Agreement. Perhaps Silver Donald Cameron was right when he argued that `Cape Breton really is the Thought Control Centre of Canada'.

Leadership Counts

MacEachen, McKenna and Mulroney are all leaders. Leadership matters.

In the Atlantic, premier-led initiatives date back to Joseph Howe. Look at Bernard Lord’s Greater Opportunity: New Brunswick's Prosperity Plan that argues, correctly, that strategic partnerships at the international level are key and vital to the provincial economy. But as George Hees observed, you don’t do business sitting on your arse.

Lord is doing it his way. In the US market, he travels with his friend Gary Doer. They’ve been to Chicago, Atlanta, Houston and they’re headed next to my old stomping grounds in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

In many ways Lord is successor to my boss, Frank McKenna, who remains Canada’s top salesman when it comes to marketing and getting out on the road.

The Border

Let’s start and end with 9-11 and the changed atmosphere in the United States. We don’t get a free pass anymore and the preoccupation with security means borders are back with a vengeance.

We got our first real taste of it on cattle. As Maurice Bernier and Mike MacIntosh of Business New Brunswick told me cattle used to wander back and forth and there was informal understanding about movement. No more. Now the slaughterhouse in PEI has an official inspector.

The thickening of the border is hurting the Atlantic. There had been a lot of ‘informal’ cross-border trade, especially between Maine and New Brunswick. In Campobello Island, where the Roosevelts spent their summers from the twenties to the forties, the seasonal shop would simply drive supplies across the border and cross back into Canada and then return the unused groceries and supplies at season’s end. No more. Rail traffic that crosses over the Maine border border and back, on its way to Montreal, is facing similar problems as the Americans apply the letter of the law. Greg Thompson, co-chair of the Canada-US IPG used to just wave at the border guard as he’d cut across Maine on his drive to Ottawa. No more.

It works both ways. Senator Susan Collins told me about her sister-in-law, a Canadian, bringing the tortiere across the border last Christmas and getting stopped. I think she finally succeeded when she gave him a taste and convinced him it really was pork and not beef.

But we’re working on it. And with success through our ‘Smart Border’ accord.

In July, Congress approved funding for a new Transportation Act and some of the money will go to improving the access routes into the I-95, the main thoroughfare to New York and Boston markets. Now, trucks and trains have to go north to Montreal and then south. New Brunswick and all of the Maritimes will benefit from more and better routes.

The threat for us is that they will apply the southern model of ‘wires, walls and minutemen’ to the northern frontier. Fortunately, the first contingent of minutemen – what my favourite aunt would describe portly men with big guns dressed in the best that the Hudson Bay basement has to offer – appeared in New Hampshire recently and were driven off by the locals who simply reminded the interlopers of the state’s credo: ‘Live free or die”.

The bigger threat lies ahead: the requirement that by January 1, 2008 Americans and Canadians crossing the border must show a passport or “other similar documentation”. This will kill the tartan-like relationships, especially those informal networks around hockey, family and school.

The Hidden Wiring

A word on my favourite subject: hidden wiring.

I’m convinced that much of the solution to our American challenge will be best dealt with at the sub-national level – the growing web of relationships between province and state, between municipalities, between cities. The federal governments create the architecture – the rules laid out through the framework of FTA, NAFTA and next, we hope, through the Security and Prosperity Partnership initiative.

But the real strength of the relationship lies at the sub-national level where people talk to one another daily about problems like the pig farm runoff into the St. Croix. And then figure out how to fix it without making it an international incident. I call these relationship – personal, practical and devoted to solving problems, the hidden wiring of the Canada-US relationship.

The New England Governors and Eastern Canadian premiers have been meeting for nearly thirty years – the creation of Maine Governor and later American Ambassador, Ken Curtis, and Nova Scotia premier and later my boss as our International Trade Minister, Gerry Regan. They convened again at the end of August in St. John’s. And because pattern require organization there has grown around it regular and sustained contact at the civil service level. Now, as friend Bill Thompson told me, civil servants are working on energy, transportation and environment through working groups established under the Council of Atlantic Premiers. Maine and New Brunswick had created bilateral groups given their geographic propinquity. It just underlined to me the growing ‘hidden wiring’ of the Canada-US relationship – the subnational cooperation that takes place without any regard or notice from the federal superstructures.

Conclusion

There is something about the Canadian character that tends to diminish our achievements. Perhaps its part of our temperament: the ‘black dog’ that haunts those of us with Scots Irish blood or Gallic distemper. But we have much to celebrate. We are actually much better than we think we are. Unlike our American cousins who lack not for self-confidence, we seem to adopt too often the approach described last night by Rex Murphy. You remember his story of the walking out onto the wharf and, commenting on what a “fine sunny day it was” to an old fisherman, he got as reply: “Aye but we’ll be paying for it soon enough”.

Maybe, but that’s still tomorrow. For now I’m putting my faith in those habits and conventions of l’Ordre du Bon Temp that have sustained Atlantic Canada and the rest of the country for over four hundred years and on which we can put no price: our music, our storytelling and our capacity for fellowship.