I hope I didn’t snore.
The woman beside me on the tightly-seated Bombardier Q400 NextGen aircraft was someone I knew from Yellowknife. So I was a bit self-conscious after we finished our cordial chat and agreed we needed to shut our eyes, as midnight was approaching.
I sleep easily while flying. All I need is a window seat, noise canceling ear buds and just enough leg-room in which to cram my six-foot-four frame. When I awoke, the full WestJet flight was on its final approach into Yellowknife, swooping through the night over the Kam Lake neighbourhood and then onto the long runway at YZF.
***
I was returning from a two-day-plus conference in the nation’s capital, the trip routed via Vancouver after a brief stop in Winnipeg. The Canadian Chamber of Commerce had held its first in-person AGM and conference since the pandemic and attendance was healthy and hearty in attitude and numbers, respectively.
In addition to internal matters surrounding the AGM, topics on the schedule included: the latest issues affecting the connectivity of Canadians; political issues of the day and what they mean for the business community; and pathways needed to get Canada to net zero (carbon neutrality) while growing the economy.
As a new executive of a chamber looking to renew itself — and one in the process of refining its strategic vision — I paid close attention to a panel discussion on the need for the chamber movement to focus on revitalizing operations to ensure sustainability and growth.
Said Canadian Chamber of Commerce president and CEO Perrin Beatty: “We hope that over the next two days you get a chance to meet your colleagues from across the country, that you’ll be able to exchange ideas about best practices to look at the challenges that your chambers … are facing and to look for ways where we can collaborate.”
Beatty listed major issues holding the business sector back at present; the most pressing being the “structural employment gap, for which there is no easy fix.”
“We’ve known for the past two decades that Canada’s declining birthrate and aging workforce would lead to a labor crunch,” he said, noting nearly one million jobs are currently open with little chance of filling them within a reasonable time.
“If businesses can’t find enough people, whether skilled or unskilled, our economy can’t grow. Our structural workforce gap is a core economic problem where policymakers of all political stripes have been sleepwalking for far too long.
“We’ve heard a lot about creating jobs. But we’ve heard much too little about creating a sustainable workforce.”
Beatty said Canada urgently needs a strategy that “does a better job of developing the skills of women, Indigenous peoples, minorities, persons with disabilities and older workers, as well as setting out new approaches to immigration, training and re-skilling and up-skilling and cut down the talent pipeline management.”
While later picking up tips on how to ‘future-proof’ an organization such as the NWT Chamber, I also learned how to better stage an event, such as a seminar or conference. Some of the tech ideas, the program structure and overall production cues I witnessed in Ottawa will make for a better experience for NWT Chamber members down the road.
While cruising through myriad booths set up for various concerns to promote their wares, I was found to be a curiosity — a welcome one, for sure — when it was discovered I was from the Northwest Territories.
While stopped at one booth for Orchard Technology — ultra low-cost online financial services in development — I met TV personality Ben Mulroney.
The son of Canada’s 18th prime minister, Brian, Ben left his TV job of two decades last year, co-founded Orchard and took the title of “chief impact officer.”
Mulroney told me Orchard’s plans include finding a test-market for its online financial services company in areas that are chronically underbanked. Such as communities in the subarctic and Arctic regions of the NWT.
“What I’m calling our moonshot or what I’d very much like to do … I want to talk with Starlink (about doing) a pilot project with us … let’s see what we can do in a community, if we give them a reliable internet,” said Mulroney, referring to Elon Musk’s global network of low-orbit satellites that bypasses the terrestrial internet.
“For a place where there are no bricks and mortar banks anywhere to be seen, what if our platform could be available on reliable internet in a remote community?” he said, noting other businesses could then be created or drawn to the community as a new form of ultra low-cost banking is available.
“What sort of businesses could be built? What sort of creativity could be online? So that’s, that’s something that I’m very excited to see if I can get past the goal line. Because if we could just test it in one location, I think it will yield tremendous results.
“Yeah, I’m getting excited just to hear myself talk.”
***
If I had snored during my slumber on that WestJet flight that night a couple of weeks ago, I heard no complaints from my seat mate. So, as we entered the terminal building, I bid goodnight and farewell to Premier Caroline Cochrane. It was well after midnight and she had to confront an increasingly nasty session of the 19th Legislative Assembly in fewer hours than she wanted to think about.
During the flight, I had briefly mentioned Mulroney and his company Orchard’s plans to the premier. I could see she was too tired and jet-lagged after flying in from a conference in Iceland to properly absorb any more than just the basic details.
I’ll contact Mulroney’s people in a while to see if they are still looking at a Northern business adventure. Orchard is so green at the moment, it only has one page on its website.