If Prince George mayor-elect Lyn Hall's passport isn't up to date, he'd better get on that because he's going to need it.
In his four years in office, it's not if but when and how often Hall will travel internationally representing Prince George. This is the kind of work that drives parochial taxpayers crazy. They want their mayor to be worry about potholes in Prince, not the price of rice in China. This small-town perspective ignores the fact that Prince George exists in a global economy and the real opportunities for growth and development lie beyond provincial and national borders.
Two of the city's major employers have been doing this work for years. UNBC and Northern Health not only devote substantial time and money towards international recruitment of academics and health professionals, they also look around the world for vendors to provide specialized equipment and services. Both large and small private employers across the region have tapped into the same opportunities. It would be irresponsible for the mayor of Prince George to sit at home waiting for good things to happen, particularly when senior levels of government are willing to help the process along.
Thanks to the hard work by Coun. Garth Frizzell, Prince George's representative with the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, the federal Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development will now work more closely with the federation to bring the benefits of international trade deals to small and medium-sized businesses in small and medium-sized cities.
"It reaffirms what municipalities have known all along - that trade and investment is happening on a city-to-city basis now, on a municipality-to-municipality basis," Frizzell said Wednesday.
That comment points to another reality of the global marketplace. Companies and communities are not waiting for national governments and formal trade delegations to get the job done. They are heading out on their own. Former mayor Colin Kinsley was widely criticized for his trips to China, as has every mayor since, but those trips will only continue and may even increase, both in frequency and in the number of locations.
Provincially, the Liberal government in general and Pat Bell in particular helped make China a major buyer of B.C. wood products over a short period of time, to the benefit of manufacturers of all sizes across the province and in the Prince George region. Furthermore, the trips to China that Shari Green took during her tenure were either partially or fully subsidized by the provincial government, since Victoria sees the benefit of having mayors at the table who can answer specific questions about their municipality's capacity to meet the needs of prospective investors.
Although Prince George still does not have a formal twin-city agreement with the Chinese city of Jiangmen, four years after talks started and 10 years after Kinsley made his first trip there, that shouldn't be considered a failure. As every entrepreneur big or small knows, putting out feelers for business opportunities takes time and money with no certainty of benefits in either the near or distant future. Yet businesses and communities that don't invest in those exploratory efforts doom themselves to stagnation and irrelevancy.
As mayor, Hall should obviously focus on the delivery of city services to residents in a timely and cost-effective manner but his job is much bigger than that. Residents need to see him also as our foreign ambassador, in much the same way Frizzell is nationally and fellow city councillor Murray Krause is provincially the Union of B.C. Municipalities.
Gone are the days of a billboard along the highway on the outskirts of the city or throwing up a website online, proclaiming that the city is open for business. So many business deals start with a handshake and a discussion about common interests. The best work our new mayor and council can do for Prince George isn't just sitting in council chambers, poring over zoning variances, it's out in the community and in the broader world, shaking hands and making new friends.
The opportunities start there.
