Nova Scotia lagging behind rest of country

Prince Rupert, B.C., has been a Pacific Gateway success story because it was developed as part of a coherent west coast strategy to augment Vancouver and capture overflow traffic from the United States west coast.

No such Atlantic Gateway strategy exists today. In its place, we have a free-for-all with every port and every province looking to maximize parochial advantage regardless of the impact on the overall Atlantic region.

Any Atlantic Gateway strategy must start with shipping lines that need room to scale, not measured over three years but over 30 years. Twentyone million additional containers are forecast to come to the eastern seaboard over the next 20 to 25 years. Bulk cargo will double and roll-onroll-off traffic will increase 160 per cent.

No one is modelling these requirements in terms of Canada’s east coast. The bottom line is that Atlantic Canada is not ready to accommodate this level of growth. In contrast, the Americans are investing heavily in their port infrastructure.

Even when present expansion plans for the port of Halifax are achieved, it will quickly max out because of this projected growth. Then what happens?

THE VITAL BULK PLAY

Prince Rupert has achieved an enviable balance between imports and exports by exporting raw materials, much of it in bulk. In fact, more than half of Prince Rupert’s exports are raw materials such as coal, grain, and logs, and semi-processed materials such as wood pellets and wood products, propane, LNG, and plastic pellets.

Halifax, meanwhile, lacks the space and facilities to support bulk and semi-processed goods. It simply does not have the room. In fact, Nova Scotia has little bulk cargo loading capacity.

Export and import stats for New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, and Nova Scotia tell an important story. Trade as a percentage of GDP is almost 35.4 per cent for New Brunswick and 31.1 per cent for Newfoundland and Labrador, larger than the Canadian average of 25.7 per cent.

The outlier here is Nova Scotia which has a population a third larger than New Brunswick and almost twice that of Newfoundland and Labrador, yet trade, especially exports, accounts for only under 13 per cent of GDP, less than half the Canadian average.

This is astonishing when you consider Nova Scotia has more than 7,000 kilometres of coastline and was founded on trade. Louisbourg and later Halifax were both built around global trade. When Nova Scotia joined Confederation, it was the richest part of Canada. Today it is the poorest. It doesn’t have to be this way.

ABUNDANT RESOURCES

Nova Scotia has abundant natural resources in global demand including coal, fly ash, copper, gold, cobalt, graphite, lithium, marble, fresh water, and abundant forests and biomass.

So why aren’t these resources finding their way into the export stream? Because we have no articulated strategy focusing on these exports and insufficient transportation infrastructure to move them. Over the past 25 years, rail lines in Nova Scotia, which are essential to bulk exports, have been steadily abandoned.

Money is not the key constraint. The world is awash in capital, in part because of record-low interest rates. It is not a lack of private investment but the absence of needed infrastructure and a welcoming regulatory environment that stands in the way of increasing exports ... and raising per capita income. In short, trade really matters.

With two elections coming at us, it is time to make trade an important part of our public discourse.