New economic development group may be best served by thinking small

By Medicine Hat News Opinon on June 20, 2019.

Meetings to determine the state of the labour market in Medicine Hat and how best to target economic development efforts got underway on Wednesday night.

One can only hope it goes beyond the 10-year brainstorming session that has led us here.

That’s not to say that big picture thinking isn’t required, and even necessary. But what’s clearly needed in Medicine Hat is well-defined, well-thought-out, attainable goals as part of a larger strategy.

We’re starting in a good place.

Aurora Cannabis, hemp-oil manufacturing, Hut 8, an expansion at Cancarb, a commercial building boom and a host of other projects bolster arguments that business conditions here are better that they have been in 10 years.

As depressing as is to see vacant oilfield shops, the activity is certainly more broad than when natural gas was rockin’ and rollin’ along in the mid-2000s.

In fact, the local economic and hiring outlook (900 new jobs in the next year) is the entire reason behind the new study.

Yet deep concern remains about the ground level economy, the plight of former oilpatch workers and the prospects for Medicine Hat and the region.

It’s been a familiar refrain that small business operators are taxed too highly, too highly regulated and in need of relief. Their lobbying leads to “business retention” as an added mandate for municipal economic developers.

That will certainly be the basis of some comments gathered at sessions held Wednesday and Thursday this week.

The Business Retention and Expansion Workforce Development (BREWD) strategy is being led by the City of Medicine Hat’s business support office. It includes a host of partners, including Verge Economic Development (the group contracted by surrounding towns and counties) as well as some businesses and Medicine Hat College.

We will await the results of their work, due later this year in a report, but a scattergun approach that recycles talking points about traditional strengths and long-proposed, go-nowhere projects simply won’t cut it.

Organizers are certainly capable, but it’s a task to separate fact from dearly held fiction and realize what’s politically expedient to say and do are two different things.

Around Medicine Hat, oilpatch activity for shallow gas will continue to remain low, and while natural gas is plentiful and cheap here (seemingly a draw for industry), it’s not more so than anywhere else in Alberta.

Also, the population here and across Canada is aging, leading to substantial changes in the labour and housing markets. It makes go-to arguments about the need population growth unattainable for the most part.

And, it’s not polite to say but it’s hard not to admit that Medicine Hat’s workforce is not particularly well-skilled to suit a fast-evolving economy. A laudable and key goal of the current effort is correcting this.

To solve a host of ills, past efforts relied on a number of big ticket cure-alls lurking in the background over the recent past. The twinning of Highway 3 or setting up a rail container port are good ideas perhaps, but the province and CP Rail clearly have other priorities. Similarly, moving the downtown railyard is as feasible as building the Meridian Dam, which will almost certainly be suggested again. Let’s also put the Wild Horse Border Crossing on the shelf for a while.

Help for small business owners is more attainable, but can be politically dicey in practice, pitting new and existing businesses against each other, or both against the rest of the general tax base.

The new provincial government appears eager to act on every suggestion of numerous business lobby groups. It leaves some question about what more local governments could do or how to make local economy’s stand out to potential investors.

It’s a tall order for the ongoing BREWD initiative, one that may be best delivered in bite-sized chunks.