Work Matters: Make SJ a Manufacturing Destinatio

It starts with this assumption: work matters. Wages have largely been stagnant since the 70’s and wealth inequality continues to be a problem that wreaks havoc on people’s ability to maintain good equitable wages and a secure quality of life according to the Institute for Research on Publicly Policy. Industrial manufacturing jobs have always paid well and we need to recognize that people want to work and want jobs that they feel are meaningful. Should Saint John pursue manufacturing industrial growth? Or should we plot a different course? 

With Russia and its allies off the table as trading partners and China demonstrating itself as an unreliable trade ally, the Canadian government is finally talking about the need to repatriate our supply chains. When markets are disrupted by things like a pandemic, war, or even a blockage in the Suez Canal, it creates costly delays and undermines our local work and economy because we have become overly reliant on these trade partners for the majority of what we need. What we need to do now is to create resiliency in our country by building and making the things we need as close to home as possible. It’s better for the environment, it’s better for our workers and community, and it creates resiliency. 

Saint John can be at the heart of that new approach. We have numerous assets that can allow us to become an important player in bringing manufacturing and distribution to Saint John in an important way. We have available serviced land in our industrial parks, a deep water port that will quadruple its carrying capacity in the next decade, a barge terminal, a majorly expanded rail network thanks to CP Rail giving us connection to the US and Mexico, and an airport with a tonne of land available around it’s recently modernized runways that could interconnect it all to the rest of the world. Whether it’s flying, sailing, or by rail we can move it, but its time to look at making it here. We already have some growing manufacturing players in this sector with Razor Manufacturing (an aero sector parts manufacture) in Saint John recently getting the nod from the federal and provincial government for investment in expanding their work. Saint John Energy has also been getting attention on the international stage courting partnerships with Norwegian companies to pilot new energy products. Currently those products are not manufactured here but if SJ Energy is the target test partner why couldn’t Saint John be the target expansion market to make these products? How do we capitalize on this?

The city of Saint John has a team working with Deloitte on a value chain analysis to break down what is in those shipping containers, where they come from, where they are going, and identify those companies that may scale their production and manufacturing of those products to our city. This is part of our work to revitalize our industrial parks which is one of councils catalytic projects. Deloitte has the expertise as a global firm doing business internationally to help us validate and understand the international supply chains traveling through Saint John. When we think about the federal government's signal to start supporting this new type of regional economic development policy we need to be able to connect the outcomes of that direction to our opportunities here. We will finish this in the first quarter of 2023 and the result will be that the team from Deloitte and the city will recommend a strategy for the common council to consider. 

What we need is an all-hands-on-deck approach to give this a chance. We need to know what the province and economic development agencies like Opportunities NB think about this. Currently, we do not have a unified strategy that the public and private sector can see, hold accountable, and measure. In other words, we have nothing to connect our strategy to despite the federal government wanting to go in this direction. We need a provincial effort that brings the private and public sector players together to create a unified strategy to support the federal government's goals of onshoring manufacturing and which highlights Saint John’s unique positioning to do so. This plan must outline the type of manufacturing we hope to attract, the tools we will use to attract it, the people responsible for doing it, and a list of actions to take to ensure other levels of government and the private sector are aware of it. Unlike other cities in Atlantic Canada, we have retained our industrial capacity and now this gives us an ecosystem advantage in promoting the type of manufacturing future that our country needs. This is work that matters. 

Published in the Telegraph Journal in March 2022