The idea that governments are just throwing up their hands and saying consumers should do it, while not looking at how they can do it with their billions of dollars per year in spending, is a cop-out.
— AMY ROBINSON
As global investors descended on Toronto recently to consider putting their money into Canada’s infrastructure (and airports), Mary Rowe wanted to consider how to generate more investment in the independent businesses that represent the bulk of the local economies in most every community.
Joining in this considerate conversation are small business advocates Amy Robinson, founder of LOCO BC, and Chris Rickett, freelance consultant and member of CUI’s Main Street Canada team.
Full Podcast
Transcript
Note to readers: This video session was transcribed using auto-transcribing software. Questions or concerns with the transcription can be directed to [email protected] with “transcription” in the subject line.
Mary Rowe:
This is the City Talk podcast brought to you with pride and sure love by the Canadian Urban Institute or CUI. I’m Mary Rowe. As our guest and history buff, Sean Speer noted in a previous episode, the level of change, the potential for change in the economy and governance in Canadian communities is at a historically rare pivot point. Most of that is being driven hard and fast by U.S. tariffs and our counter-tariffs, but also by the federal government strategies to leverage or maybe even exploit the rupture, as Prime Minister Carney described it in his Davos speech, to shift the country’s relationships with other nations and their markets. Now it’s fine and necessary to play well in the big game on the world stage, but as we at CUI are happy to reiterate, Canada’s economy is actually comprised of many, many local economies, first and foremost. And they are in need of innovative investment and various kinds of programs to ensure that the benefits of change are made real on the main streets and downtowns across this country. Not just on the balance sheet of the country or large pension funds and institutional investors. We’re looking for the win-win here, as they say. Real investment in real places. Joining me to discuss all that potential are two champions of local economies, well known to CUI, and I’d like them to introduce themselves and their current locations.
Amy Robinson:
Of course, Amy Robinson. I’m the founder and executive director of Loco VC. I’m here at my home office in the unceded territories of the Musqueams, Squamish, and Tsleil-Watooth people, otherwise known as East Vancouver. And Loco is a not-for-profit organization, and we do research and campaigning around the importance of local independent business.
Mary Rowe:
Great. And Chris, you are somewhere, not adrift, never adrift, but you are somewhere on the road in Northern Ontario, I think.
Chris Rickett:
Uh I’m Chris Rickett. I’m uh on the side of the Trans-Canada Highway on my way to Espinola to meet with a team that’s looking at restarting a pulp and paper mill to bring uh a sovereign supply of pulp and specialty paper back to the Canadian market. My background is in economic development, uh, 20 plus years in the public sector, formerly with the City of Toronto and York region. Uh these days I uh support a number of clients, including the Canadian Urban Institute and others on local community economic development initiatives.
Mary Rowe:
Very good. Well, thanks, gang, for joining us because it’s such an interesting time. And we are recording today at an interesting time in Toronto where the Prime Minister has called together a couple of hundred investors who are coming with institutional capital from around the world uh to talk about investing in Canada and how they what are the opportunities to invest primarily in large-scale infrastructure. There is another part of the story, which is uh deals that are not billion-dollar deals. They might be half a billion, they might be a hundred million, they might be ten million, they might be ten thousand. But the idea that there are all sorts of investable propositions in this country, and how do we start to have that conversation about how we invest in local places? So let me just start by asking, I’ll start with you, Amy, how how old is Local BC and talk to me about why you got interested in this? What where did your interest in this come from?
Amy Robinson:
We’ve been around since 2009, so coming up on 17 years. And my interest came, I was in the sustainability world and interested in how to implement sustainability and small small business. There was it was just sort of the rise of corporate social responsibility at the time, but uh we were also looking at how do we address the many more numbers uh with smaller impacts of small and mid-sized businesses. Some of the first social entrepreneurs in the US, the Judy Wicks and Stonyfield Farms of the world were really were recognizing this. And so I went to many conferences and sort of learned from them. And, you know, this was the age of you know, small is beautiful, and and so um started to think about the idea that how could we do small and have it be a meaningful part of the economy that’s not uh just some quaint, you know, mom and pop, some of the small businesses I know hate that term. But it is a big part of the economy, it’s more distributed, so it’s a little bit harder to engage. But um, there’s a lot of people who really are innovative, have great ideas, and care about their communities that that we can engage there.
Mary Rowe:
So it was grounded in place, and I also met Judy Wicks through that period. Uh and I’m assuming you met her at BALLE the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies. And she she just will we’ll just put into our notes that people can Google Judy Wicks, she’s still around. She had something called the White Dog Cafe in Philadelphia, and she created uh a whole buyer’s network through that restaurant and was a great model for people about how you could stitch together uh uh supplier relationships in a much tighter, closer relationship if you knew where your products were coming from, you knew where your products were going, which is part of I think the the transition we’re in right now. And uh so I’m gonna come to you next, Chris, and talk a little bit about you. You worked in institutional settings, as you suggested. You worked for municipal government, you’ve had all and you’re also an entrepreneur, just a born entrepreneur. Uh and so let’s talk a little bit about what you’re seeing on the ground uh in terms of what’s the uh challenge and maybe an opportunity for local businesses now in this uh extraordinary period we’re facing.
Chris Rickett:
Take a pro the project I’m working on, Espinola right now. So, you know, a pulp mill is really the foundation of your of your forestry sector at the end of the day. Without it, especially with soft wood lumber tariffs, you’ve got nowhere for the waste wood to go to be actually then turned into another product. So now you’ve got you’ve lost a revenue stream. But the the piece of that is that like a lot that pulp is created, and typically we end up just exporting most of that pulp to the US, but then we import it back as specialty paper. Wow. You know, it’s the same thing with furniture, right? Like, you know, we cut lots of wood down and we make lots of we make lots of furniture, but like we import about 80 billion in in furniture from the US and we export about 40. Those are big numbers, but like why can’t we make more of that in Canada instead of going south, you know, going north-south, we think about that east-west, right? So, you know, we do have a big consumer economy, but we’ve outsourced in many regards the actual making of the materials and then we’re bringing it back. Or we’re making it, but we’re selling it south, uh, not east-west. So, you know, we’re we’re in this situation where we we need to rethink what do we make locally and what do we make from those uh resources, and how do we build markets for them across Canada as opposed to just looking south? It it’s hard, isn’t it?
Mary Rowe:
Because we’ve witnessed over the last 25 years that the US and the Canadian economy have become an integrated economy. They’re and then they’re integrated regionally, as we know. That’s the other thing, is that we have parts of the country that uh so where Amy lives, a large uh connection with Washington State, with Oregon, with the Northwest industries, uh just as you’re ex suggesting, also where you are in Northern Ontario, lots of of cross-border with Michigan and with the bordering states. We know that we know that the Southern Ontario automotive industry became extraordinarily integrated. In fact, uh when I was in the Premier’s office, we used to brag, oh, you know, a car goes across the border seven times. Like this was this constant illustration of how productive and and mutual we were and all that kind of thing. And now here we are, as you’re suggesting, at this moment where we have to say, okay, well, wait a second, made us vulnerable to this kind of disruption that we’re facing now. And so can we replace those markets? So so you tell me, Chris, what if you’re a small business, maybe you’re in Espinola or maybe you’re in Sarnia, uh, you’re a small business and you rely on an American supplier for inputs into your product, or and you rely on an American buyer for your product, what are your options?
Chris Rickett:
Yeah, it’s it’s a tough one. It’s such an integrated economy, and we’ve built it for the last 40 years, right? Um, you know, but you think back to that debate between John Turner and Brian Mulroney. And like that was John Turner’s warning that this would happen. Um, so it’s interesting to look back on that. And and it’s not to say we shouldn’t continue to build those trade relationships uh, you know, north-south, and things will evolve over time. That said, when we come to resilience, we need to think about other markets and opportunities. And I think sometimes we just discount the Canadian market and our own uh, you know, our own neighbors across the country, right? You know, it’s it’s a big, you know, if you take consumer products, 40 million, yeah, not as big as the US, but it’s a pretty big market at the end of the day. And we import more consumer products from the US than we export to the US, which tells me there’s a market here for Canadian products to find those other Canadian consumers. Um, you know, and that and of course that takes investment, that takes time, and it’s a change in behaviors. Um, but from a resilience perspective, you it’s something you’re gonna look, you’re probably gonna need to explore if you’re gonna stay in business. We have a lot of talk about let’s export to Europe, let’s export to Asia. Well, and those are all interesting opportunities, but also big lifts. You know, a much easier lift, first off, for a lot of companies is like, well, how do I sell more to Ontario uh and a little bit less to Washington State? And and rethinking that that reconnection there.
Mary Rowe:
I mean, I always think of Jane Jacobs and import replacement, that this is how explosive economic growth happens, is that there’s a process by which you do start to replace things that you were importing with local product, and then you modify, and then it changes again, and then you sell, and then you and that there’s a continuous process of import, export, import, export replacement. Uh, Amy, in terms of who you’re servicing in BC, the members that are supporting you, what are they telling you is the biggest challenge that they’re facing? Recognizing that not everybody is tariffed and not every product is tariffed. Uh, but I’m interested that there’s still a sort of general feeling of uncertainty.
Amy Robinson:
Aaron Powell Yeah, I think uncertainty is sort of the since COVID, really, I think has been the way that people are doing business. So that’s certainly challenging. I do think that small businesses are more nimble and uh, you know, better able to roll with things, although it’s exhausting, right? They don’t have a lot of resources and they’re undercapitalized. And so, and like, you know, these government programs aren’t um aimed at them often. They’re aimed at the big industries. And so I do think that support programs need to be uh better targeted at really what their needs are. And uh it’s hard for them to grow, right? We don’t we don’t help businesses sort of grow from small to that medium stage. They really feel left out when they get to a certain size. And I mean, I think it’s it’s I’m hopeful it’s a it’s an interesting time where we’re sort of having a test of this, you know, can’t how much can we sell locally and how much can we develop these local uh economies? And certainly many consumers have uh taken up the rallying cry and are are you know reading labels and buying local. I would love to see governments put their mouth money where their mouth is on this. Some of them say, oh, it’s too expensive. Some of them say, you know, we’re in existing supply agreements that we can’t get out of, we can’t break. Governments are not allowed to prefer a local business, but we have done research, and so has Buy Social Canada. Uh, they represent social enterprises in the country around how it can be done. And I mean, as early as 2013, we provided a guidebook for local governments on how they how they could do it. You can even do it if you have a large contract with a large business, you can require them to buy local or require them to uh hire local people. So there’s lots that can be done. So the idea that governments are just throwing up their hands and saying consumers should do it, but we’re not really looking at how we can do it with our billions of dollars per year in spending is a cop-out in my mind.
Mary Rowe:
It’s kind of infuriating. I know. The thing is, it it takes all of these things. Like there’s no single intervention, you know. And I I am concerned, uh, Chris, you just said this. I mean, we are 44 million people or whatever it is we are. Like we are a market. And we often hear people say, oh, no, no, no, no, it’s too small a market. As if, well, therefore, we don’t want to be concerned about it. But what you’re saying is we actually often sell out of our market and then buy back into it. And uh, and so now we’re being, you know, presented with a crisis that’s going to require us to say, well, could we actually shorten that? I I want to talk about productivity if I can, because I think that’s another trope. I don’t know whether you folks remember when the governor of the Bank of Canada said the problem with the Canadian economy is that there are too many SMEs. And the inference I took from that was that they don’t grow, that that we keep them, they all stay at that sort of middle stage and they don’t get to the next phase, and then there’ll be an accusation that we’re not productive. So how do we say to ourselves, wait a sec, there’s a different measure, or there’s because I always think that many SMEs is actually an indication of resilience, diversity, uh, and strength that we have. But how do we live in this world where you can see the investment pattern is fewer and bigger deals? Chris.
Chris Rickett:
And and I I think, you know, when we think about these these pieces as big deals, uh, you know, there’s a there’s a challenge in all of this as well, right? Like take Espinola and its pulp mill as a perfect example. Uh it was closed by a multinational. Right. Even though it made a profit, uh, it just didn’t make enough for that multinational. And so, you know, when we talk about bringing in investment, great, but that investment decision is made in another country once something’s operating here. And that, you know, the interests of what might be an Espanola or whatever community in the country is not really taken into account. And so an Espanola, you know, restarting a mill that was profitable, but now by a Canadian company, uh is, you know, an example of things that we should be encouraging. And when we look at the support, you know, for companies through tariffs, and you know, Amy hit the nail on the head. There’s lots of you know, support for Stelco, who, you know, is owned by an American company that has, you know, advocated for tariffs, um, but not for you know, the SME on Main Street, who’s having to deal with the impact of those tariffs, right? And so how do we actually support those small businesses, you know, in transitioning markets and adapting to this tariffs, I think, you know, is a big question mark. And recognizing, you know, back to your investment question is like just because it’s big doesn’t mean, you know, it’s it’s the solution. We have lots of small projects that will add to that resilience, will result in local businesses hiring local people and keeping that money within their communities and recycling it within communities that might be happening from some of these bigger deals at the end of the day.
Mary Rowe:
So let’s talk about what we think the next set of steps are. As you know, we’re talking to all sorts of folks about what are the tangible ways we can do this. And I appreciated Amy your comment at the beginning when you said, you know, it’s not about quaint. Small is not actually about quaint. Small is actually about strength. Because if you have many, many, many, many, many small, you are actually stronger than one. Uh, you know, we know that in in resilience thinking, if you only have one path in and one path out, you are less resilient than if you have many, many paths. So when you’re looking now to the next three or four years, Amy, what are you focusing on over there with your partners?
Amy Robinson:
One of the things we’re focusing on is affordability. And we tend to work with a consortium of partners and we provide the data and sort of take it, take that work off the side of their desks and then uh mostly leave the advocacy to them. So we’ve done some work around the cost of doing business and how local governments and provincial governments can can help there because it’s becoming untenable to run a business and buy local uh supply chain and services and pay your workers a fair wage. And uh we just launched with Small Business Vancouver a direct support program, which we don’t often do, but we did this kind of a model about 10 years ago called the Business Clinic. Small Business BC was a provincial organization that closed down here uh a couple of years ago. And so we have gotten back into that direct support model where we provide connections for local businesses to experts in you know legal accounting, operations, those kinds of things. And we’re certainly getting those kind of questions that we feel like would have gone to Small Business BC in the past. So trying to provide that direct support to, you know, if they’ve got a permitting issue or a leasing issue, or you know, they need help with marketing.
Mary Rowe:
Yeah. And you can help them troubleshoot.
Amy Robinson:
Yeah, exactly. And then they don’t have to sort of do the vetting themselves. So that is just launched, and and we’re starting to see quite a bit of uptake on that.
Mary Rowe:
But just well, two things that I don’t want to lose. One is what you just suggested, Amy, around municipal procurement. Um, and how do we actually start to insist that the public purchasing that’s being made, municipal governments spend billions, billions, and billions of dollars. And so how do we actually enable that kind of preference to take place? That’s the first thing. The other thing is I have a link, I have a linguistic thing. You know, it’s so interesting. When we talk about small businesses, we talk about supporting them. And when we look at large sectors, we talk about investing in them. So I want to stop, you know what I mean? Like it’s there’s there’s this remedial bias that we’ve got. It’s like we’re supporting a child versus investing in an up in an adult. So let’s move our language, all of us, collectively, into investing in what is the core of our economy. That’s a lot of what we talk about. And you know, CUI stood up Main Street Canada, which uh Chris can talk about in two seconds because we wanted to make that point that the main street economy is vibrant, essential. Um, it it provides all it’s spatially uh rooted in a place, it provides all sorts of economic benefit and jobs, and but it also is such a part of the fabric of our communities, which is why we keep saying it’s about the main street economy. Um and I appreciate the resource guide that you guys have put together on the responses to tariffs, and as you suggest, the affordability piece, because again, I think we could argue that that um we haven’t been good at investing or creating the enabling conditions for independent businesses to flourish because we have this old knee-jerk thing that we have to support big sectors. And and I’d love to find a way for us to lose that, but we’ll see. I mean, it’s not that we don’t, but we have to do both. Chris, talk to us about Main Street Canada and also the next phase of it, data and how that can help businesses find new markets.
Chris Rickett:
Yeah, I think you know, uh what we’ve been doing at the Canadian Urban Institute it for the last kind of five years is using sophisticated market research data to help Main Streets, BIAs, municipalities, and of course the businesses on those streets understand who was coming to their communities, what they spent money on, where they were coming from, what they were interested in, which was really leveraged to look at how they could invest in their in their businesses and invest in their communities to grow that opportunity. Um and using that data uh and aligning it with the investment, you know, meant that investment was probably likely to succeed as opposed to just putting my finger up in the air and hoping for the best. And and so, you know, as a result of all that work with Main Street Canada, you can flip that data around and use it the other way. So I’m a Main Street business who does e-commerce, I’m a consumer-focused manufacturer that’s you know, selling furniture or beauty products to the US. Well, now I can take that same data we’ve been doing for Main Street Canada and look across Canada and figure out where do people spend money on what I make? Uh, which markets have the most potential, where do they spend the most, but also how to reach those folks from a media perspective? Uh, what are their psychographic characteristics so I can figure out how to speak to them? And then ultimately, what are the publications? That I need to do outreach to. And then I can think about do I go direct to consumer? Do I go through a distributor? Which retailers do I engage with? But that data is all here. And, you know, we’ve been working with it for the last five years with our partners at Environics Analytics, but making that accessible to the small businesses that Amy and that we’ve been working with is a challenge. Big corporations use it already, but my mom and pop, uh, you know, my five-person manufacturing firm. So this is what we’re really focused on is how do we use this data to help those consumer manufacturers, those retailers realize the opportunity of the Canadian market and connect them to it.
Mary Rowe:
Part of the challenge here, Chris, is with Next Market Canada, what you’re addressing here, is that we’ve become uh detached from where we get our things or where we buy our things. People just go to the store and they get them. So we’ve at the we’re in this moment where suddenly consumers are figuring it out and saying, and as you say, maybe and Amy just suggested, maybe they’re reading labels, maybe they’re making differentiating choices. But the reality is that in in Canada that we’ve had interprovincial trade barriers. So it may have been easier to sell into Michigan or import from Michigan than it was to actually sell into Manitoba. Have we made any progress on that? Is this part of what Next Market Canada will try to address? Is the interprovincial barriers, which I know the Prime Minister has put the flag in the sand and said we’re gonna break these down, but are we?
Chris Rickett:
I think there’s a lot of work to be done. And it’s it’s it’s easier for you know uh a brewer to sell into the US than it is uh across provincial jurisdiction. So is there lots of work to do? 100%. Um are they making progress? As we know, sometimes government takes a little while, as does the private sector, to adapt. Um uh but I think what we can do here with data is give them the roadmap of where the opportunity is, which hopefully creates even more policy urgency to drop those regulatory requirements and harmonize. Um, and even, you know, with Jane Jacobs, like those regulations are some are really put there to stifle competition and innovation uh and instead of like being able to that creation locally and innovate. Um and so I I think we have to look at this as not of necessarily even a regulation conversation, it’s about an innovation conversation about how we bring new products and innovate on those products across the country and sell them to ourselves.
Mary Rowe:
Yeah, I I worry that we’ve allowed this to get trivialized, you know. Oh, Main Street’s quaint, just what Amy said at the outset, or oh, the Canadian market is too small. Uh no, I mean, as you say, we are millions of people and we have all sorts of resources. We have lots of savings, for instance, we have lots of real estate wealth, we have lots and lots of wealth that Canadians are sitting on in some capacity. How do we deploy it? How do we invest it? How do we actually move our not just our consumer money, but our investment capital into local businesses? Let’s just finish with that if we could. If we get through this strange period with the United States and we get into a new kind of normal, whatever the bilateral relationship will look like, where do you hope we we will sustain this effort? In other words, it won’t just be seen as something that we did when we were in crisis with the United States. Amy, have you got thoughts about that, about the patterns that you’ve seen over time that you hope are being strengthened? I know procurement is one of them. Anything else?
Amy Robinson:
I do think government supports for growing businesses often have focused on exports, like our food sector. We’ve had a lot of bi-local, you know, support for food producers in BC for a number of years. And it’s really focused around how to grow to export. And so I think we need to shift and figure out how to, you know, so there’s some good programs there, and and we could just shift to see how do we help businesses grow and identify. And we’re not going to help them. We’re not helping them. We’re not helping them, we’re investing in them. We’re investing in them. Okay, okay, yes. I agree, I agree. Investing in them.
Mary Rowe:
But this and also this idea though that we can export to ourselves, I guess that’s what we’re really saying. We want to export to ourselves. And that’s a that’s a a pretty interesting way for us to start imagining tightening the weave of our economy to say, well, we want to actually sell fuel and you know, think of the inside of, I always think of it inside of a hardball, you know, all those elastic bands that are wedged in together. That’s what an economy, a really dense, healthy economy, is like, a big, hard-packed bunch of elastic bands. And we’ve allowed those elastic bands to be pushed in different, pulled in different directions. So, Chris, just as we finish here, Next Market Canada, what’s the potential here for a business or for a region if we actually pursue something like Next Market Canada? Tell me how that will work.
Chris Rickett:
Again, we, you know, focusing on those small businesses that are the majority of consumer manufacturers, the majority of manufacturers, majority of uh the businesses on our main streets, uh, giving them market intelligence of where there are products can sell the best across Canada. And that data exists, but how do you, you know, what we’re looking at with next market is ultimately how do you make that consumable and straightforward? That I don’t need to be a data scientist to figure it out, but here’s my best five markets, here’s the postal codes, and here’s the platforms to best to engage and grow those customers. Like that’s what we’re talking about with next market is uh making clear go-to-market strategies that uh a small business can jump into and build upon. This is this is a realignment and a readjustment. Um and, you know, how do we invest in our companies to through that transition is is really you know the mission of what we need to do at a community level, but of course what we need to see from the government as well.
Mary Rowe:
Yeah. I mean it’s all it’s er it’s all of the ways in which we purchase and plan and invest in uh local economies. So thanks for joining both of both of you, Amy and uh Chris, in sharing your perspective from one uh part of the country to the other, because we are in a very similarly challenged environment that we can see happening uh at all scales and in all different parts of the country, whether you’re northern Ontario or southern BC or in all parts of between. So thanks for joining City Talk, and uh uh we look forward to continuing to talk about how we’re building more resilient uh local economies. Thanks for joining us.
Amy Robinson:
Thanks for having me.
Mary Rowe:
Thank you. We have many more conversations about Canada’s economy and economy adjacent, lined up for this season of Citytalk. You’ll find us here every Thursday morning where you source your podcast listening. And we’d appreciate any comments you may have on what you’ve heard or on anything else you’d like the CUI podcast team to hear about. Drop us a line at Citytalk at CanUerb.org. That’s Citytalk, oh one word, at C A N U R B dot org. I’m Mary Rowe. Thanks for listening.
