City seeks ‘global perspective’

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This article was published 28/02/2025 (281 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Brandon’s two-person economic development office is awaiting the release of a commissioned report that it’s hoped will help the city attract more foreign investment and in turn drive the local economy.

And that report comes just as Manitobans stare down the barrel of a slew of imposed tariffs on Canadian imports by the U.S. administration of Donald Trump.

“I think we are quite well situationed,” Brandon’s director of economic development, Gerald Cathcart, said this week. “We’ve seen growth in manufacturing and the labour force. We’ve seen significant growth in the investments made by both foreign-owned companies and locally owned companies.

“The key that I’m going to attach to that is the tariffs. The tariffs are going to be challenging for all of our exporters, big or small.”

About a year ago, the city announced plans to hire a consultant to develop a comprehensive city strategy to lure new international business investment.

The chosen consultant was to identify links between local businesses and potential foreign direct investment opportunities, identify communication platforms for international outreach, create an action plan for the city and also develop marketing materials in line with industry standards.

Ultimately, administration chose Deloitte Canada, which is expected to give the city its completed report sometime today.

Cathcart says having a more global perspective provided by an outside consultant will be important for the city’s future, particularly when it comes guiding the city with necessary adjustments that will make Brandon more enticing to foreign investment.

“Having the national perspective from Deloitte will help us set our sights,” Cathcart said. “Just really being a two-person department here, sometimes we’re challenged to figure out what that global perspective would be, and how we best are suited for meeting requests that come in from global investor anchors.

“The strategy is all about getting us more prepared, better prepared. What (is) the language of the international site selectors? Because that changes, right? So we want to know what the current state of global investment is.”

When the tender went out in search of a consultant firm, the department had already identified specific investment opportunities for Brandon, including warehousing and storage, food ingredients, biofuels and biomaterial manufacturing, value-added carbon dioxide and hydrogen utilization and metals manufacturing.

These opportunities have been brought into the conversation with Deloitte while working with the department. Cathcart says the company will be focusing in on two sectors of the local economy as a means to attract investment, including chemical manufacturing and food product manufacturing.

Already Deloitte has produced two documents focusing on these areas in relation to employment and manufacturing statistics, in comparison to the province and other regions.

And if you look at Brandon’s place in the country, Cathcart says the city holds up pretty well.

“We have some water capacity. We have wastewater capacity. We have both railroads here,” Cathcart said. “One of the things we focus on in our marketing materials is the complexity of the industry here. In Manitoba, the largest chemical clusters, we’re it in Manitoba in terms of things like Koch, Chemtrade (Logistics), Pfizer and the infrastructure that supports those companies.”

While it’s the job of the city’s economic development office to increase business investment and improve the overall environment for business growth, the need for the city to look further afield for investors to other continents has become more pressing in the last few months as the United States continues to threaten 25 per cent tariffs over Canadian imports like the proverbial sword of Damocles.

“It’ll all be about how we manage these circumstances,” Brandon Mayor Jeff Fawcett said on Thursday. “We will be ready on the corporate level, and then we’ll try to do everything we can to work with people on the whole citywide level.”

Part of the push for more economic growth, particularly out of foreign markets, is to increase Brandon’s ability to deal with difficult economic circumstances, and the turmoil that we are currently experiencing.

Thankfully for Brandon, Fawcett said, the community is smaller in scope and therefore will likely feel less of an impact. But there will still be an impact.

“We know for a fact that the big economic places like the Calgarys and Torontos and anything around Toronto in that area would take a much bigger hit than we will. But you know, I wish that a mid-sized city mayor could go in there and alleviate the U.S. government’s issues, but I’m not 100 per cent sure it can,” Fawcett said somewhat jokingly.

Councillors, too, are waiting for a look at the Deloitte report, and to hear back from Cathcart on the city’s economic development efforts going forward.

“I don’t think its something that we talk about as a council on as regular a basis as we could or should,” said Coun. Bruce Luebke (Ward 6), “and how that impacts our tax base. Obviously if you can attract more industry, more business to Brandon, it expands our tax base, which is actually one of the things pointed out in our MNP report — to enhance and increase our tax base.”

His hope, he says, is to see how Brandon could do things differently, and what some of the challenges are.

Currently there are two major economic challenges for the city that Cathcart identified in his conversation with the Sun, including a lack of electrical capacity through Manitoba Hydro, and a lack of enough industrial land to offer potential investors looking to set up shop.

Efforts are underway to mitigate these issues. Manitoba Hydro has promised to increase Brandon’s electrical capacity with a 100-megawatt upgrade set to be completed by 2027. That initiative is being led by Manitoba Hydro with the support of the province, with the aim of addressing the growing energy demands of the city’s industrial sector.

The problem, according to Coun. Glen Parker (Ward 9), is one of competitiveness, because other communities are vying to do the same thing.

“There are jurisdictions on both sides of the border who are really willing to drop their drawers to get any kind of major investment, industrial investment in the communities,” Parker said. “It’s a really difficult chore.

What Brandon has in its favour, he said, is essentially location, with regionally priced land. But the city’s current situation offers still other challenges, including easy access to Ontario and further east. He also echoed Cathcart’s concerns about the lack of turnkey industrial land.

“We don’t have eastern air flights, which may or may not be detrimental to some companies, and we don’t have a lot of pre-developed industrial land just yet. We have a lot of land available, but not all developed. We can’t just have somebody come in and plop a Maple Leaf-style building down and get at it, right?”

For his part, Cathcart says his office has been working with local businesses to try to address concerns over the U.S. tariffs, and has had representatives from the Canadian Trade Commissioner’s office come to the city to talk with many of the smaller exporters about what it could mean for their businesses, and what diversifying their markets would and could look like.

That said, Cathcart points to the numerous local investments made by larger corporations that already operate in Brandon as a strong show of support for the local market.

In 2014, Saputo Dairy completed a 40,000-square-foot expansion that was to translate into roughly 60 new positions for the company.

Koch Fertilizer Canada in the last few years has invested more than $275 million into its Brandon facilities, including upgrades to expand manufacturing, enhance efficiency and improve its environmental and health and safety performance.

Maple Leaf continues to expand its sustainable hog production through “innovative waste to energy production.” And last year, Cascadia Metals announced a $25-million expansion to its building by 125,000 square feet.

All of these investments show that Brandon can be a great place to do business, Cathcart said, and will be used down the road to entice further investment into the city from outside North America.

Nevertheless, he still remains hopeful that the United States as a country may come back down to Earth and see reason before too long.

“We’ve had one of the most successful partnerships in trade, almost of anywhere in the world. Common values, strong ties between people,” he said. “I do think that those relationships will come through in the end.”

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