Trials have made local economy stronger

The Brockville chamber of commerce’s top exec is optimistic about the challenges ahead. This is Part Two of Postmedia’s How Canada Wins series.

Editor’s note: This is Part Two in our contribution to Postmedia’s national series “How Canada Wins.” Over five weeks we are chronicling our community’s place in the country, the promise of greater prosperity, and the blueprint to get there.

The Brockville area’s business community has been tested twice in the past 10 years and has come out stronger, notes the executive director of the region’s largest business group.

Now, a third test has begun, and Pam Robertson, executive director of the Brockville and District Chamber of Commerce, thinks a more prosperous future lies ahead if area businesses band together like they did before.

Local economic leaders weathered the first tariff storm from a Trump White House in 2018, then the COVID-19 pandemic, and while the more sweeping tariffs imposed by the U.S. president this week are a cause for great concern, Robertson thinks “our business community is more savvy” this time around.

The previous trials taught the region’s business leaders to work more closely together, said Robertson, who has been the chamber’s executive director since 2015.

“We need to support one another and see if there are synergies in the supply chain, business to business,” she added.

This latest crisis has also brought opportunities for the kinds of action that will lead to a bigger, stronger local economy on this side of the river long after the tariff battles are just a moment in history, Robertson believes.

Provincial leaders finally appear serious about lowering interprovincial trade barriers, though Canadians have been talking about that for years, she noted.

“If we’re not supporting one another in our country, how can we really thrive?” said Robertson.

Movement on interprovincial trade barriers is encouraging, but other steps needed include greater investment in local infrastructure, and shoring up post-secondary education, now threatened locally by cuts to St. Lawrence College, she believes.

“I am optimistic, but it has to be really a focused energy to it, just as we saw during the pandemic,” said Robertson.

The Brockville and District Chamber of Commerce boasts more than 300 members, and acts as the area’s official “voice of business,” often lobbying local and senior levels of government on issues relevant to the business community.

The new Trump tariffs are an immediate and urgent matter, but more longstanding issues continue to hamper economic growth in the region.

The pandemic has increased the prevalence of remote work, and the region has plenty to offer someone who would prefer to work outside a larger centre, noted Robertson.

“To attract people, we need infrastructure, though, we need houses.”

In the latter case, she said, existing employers continue to struggle with a labour shortage exacerbated by the high cost of housing.

One positive start is the planned Campus Habitations development at Row’s Corners, which would create 140 rental apartment units geared toward the income levels of workers at local industries.

Such projects address the labour shortage and help grow the economy, said Robertson.

“If we have more people in our community, the tax base is bigger,” she said.

The Campus Habitations project remains in the planning stages as developers attempt to clear a bureaucratic hurdle at the provincial level, and figure out how to connect the proposed development to services, said Brant Burrow, mayor of the site’s host township, Elizabethtown-Kitley. Attempts to secure provincial funding for those service connections proved unsuccessful.

“Although tariffs and an unsettled world may be consuming everyone’s mental energy right now, housing challenges have not magically disappeared for anyone in the meantime,” Burrow said in an email to The Recorder and Times.

“It is the right solution, in the right place, at the right time. We just need to pull together to iron out a couple of remaining wrinkles, and clear the path to make it happen.”

Meanwhile, during the recent provincial election campaign, MPP-elect Steve Clark welcomed Brockville Mayor Matt Wren’s mention of reviving a community advisory body that would work with St. Lawrence College to design programs geared toward local workforce needs.

Robertson agrees it is crucial to shore up St. Lawrence College as it faces its current challenges.

College president and CEO Glenn Vollebregt blames those challenges largely on the federal government’s restrictions on international students, and Robertson insists those international students are needed, too – especially as Canada seeks skilled immigrants to make up for a declining birth rate.

“We need people from other countries to come into our country and to keep it thriving,” said Robertson.

The Brockville chamber of commerce recently announced that Shelley Bacon, CEO of Brockville-based manufacturer Northern Cables, is the latest recipient of its Lifetime Business Achievement Award.

Bacon also chairs the St. Lawrence Corridor Economic Development Commission, and he has some ideas of his own about how to achieve a more prosperous, vibrant economy.

“We do need much more domestic, Canadian-based manufacturing and business activities, where it’s homegrown,” said Bacon.

Canada, said Bacon, had “a very good run” in the manufacturing sector in the period between the Second World War and the era of free trade with the United States.

“The free trade deals in ’88 and ’94 basically closed all of the branch U.S. factories that existed in this country,” he added.

“Fortunately, we’ve had a number of industries across this country that have sprung up after that, a lot of private enterprises,” said Bacon.

“I think on a go-forward basis we need to see much more of that type of activity in this country, not to be looking for outside people, but for what we can do internally.”

That, of course, is the trajectory Bacon and his partners followed in the mid-to-late 1990s, when they created Northern Cables from the closure of the Phillips Cables plant in Brockville.

Reiterating a point made by fellow Brockville industrialist David Beatty of Canarm, Bacon believes these local manufacturers can work together to sell their products in conjunction with each other.

“We really should be looking internally (at) what we can do collectively together,” said Bacon.

Rzajac@postmedia.com

https://www.recorder.ca/news/more-jobs-likely-at-leclerc-site-president