Guest blog by Kevin Casmiro Moraes, LEG’23
As a transplant from a major urban center – Toronto – Prince Rupert was a culture shock. A small, northern community, located on an island just a 40-minute ferry ride from Alaska. This was a big change for a guy who spent his whole life in the big city, but I moved for an incredible opportunity working for one of Canada’s strategic trade corridors. As the 2nd largest and fastest growing port in Canada, the Port of Prince Rupert plays a pivotal role in spurring economic growth and development for not just Western Canadian natural resource sectors by getting goods to international markets, but it also supports the vast manufacturing sectors in my home of Toronto and other major Eastern Canadian centers, by getting manufacturing inputs, such as auto parts, to assembly plants.
The vast importance of the port to Canada’s economic growth strategy is highlighted in numerous government strategic plans and policies, such as the Indo-Pacific Strategy, Government of Canada Budget 2023, British Columbia Economic Recovery Plan, Alberta Economic Corridors Plan, and much more. But the significant role the port plays in economic growth for national and regional economies is hindered by local variables that have been overlooked. The importance placed on national and provincial governments, as well as private sector firms has been the need to invest in supply chain infrastructure – port terminals, rail expansion, road infrastructure, digital and automation technology. However, as the port is in a small, northern community, local implications to everyday port operations has and will continue to have impacts to the ports ability to grow and continue to generate economic impacts for Canada.
As the head of government and external affairs for the Port of Prince Rupert, part of my role is to oversee strategic initiatives, in collaboration with external partners, that support local and regional economic development. This is meant to help the port improve its social license to operate and grow, but also mitigate and solve local issues that are impacting the port. With the impact of COVID-19, Canada has faced a significant labour crunch as immigration was halted and a large spike in retirements left vast economic sectors scrambling for available labour. Additionally, with the exodus of millennials from major urban centres during the pandemic to small, rural communities, home prices across Canada started to rise. Once the top recruitment tool for small communities, rural community homes are now the biggest deterrent to recruitment.
Communities across Northern Canada are facing similar and different issues when it comes to the labour crisis, and all are trying to find their unique way of identifying how to solve for it. There are the tried-and-true initiatives, such as recruitment campaigns advertising high paying jobs, but as this crisis has impacted communities across the country, how does the Port of Prince Rupert stand out to attract new employees and mitigate the labour shortage impacting port growth? This was the problem I came to the ‘Leading Economic Growth’ course and what I learned was that how I framed the problem was more important then anything else I would do.
The first few weeks of the program focused on understanding different types of problems – complicated vs. complex – and the strategies you can take to solve your economic problem. Spending weeks rethinking and redefining the problem statement was initially a bit odd because myself and many others came to the course with a problem they knew they had. What I started to learn is that when you start to deconstruct your economic problem, it starts to highlight the complexity within your original problem statement. For example, for the Week 3 assignment, I defined my growth challenge as workforce development training. I already started to redefine my problem as not about the need to recruit more employees into Prince Rupert but rather develop more training opportunities for locals to learn new knowhow and skills. This was done thanks to the really great fishbone exercise, which I will continue to use, as it forces one to think through the vast variables impacting the growth challenge.
Through consistent rethinking and defining of the growth problem through the fishbone and binding constraint exercises, the program helped me to start narrow on the key challenges that make up the growth problem. As noted in my fishbone diagram below, there are five key categories that need to be tackled to make an impact on the port growth challenge. But when reviewing both quantitative – employment and housing data – and qualitative – entry and exit interview surveys – data, I was able to identify the binding constraint impacting both the recruitment and retention of labour – community infrastructure deficit. The lack of training opportunities in the community stifled creating new knowhow amongst the existing labour force, and the lack of tax benefit incentives, such as the Northern Tax Allowance, had impacts on recruitment, but new employees and exiting employees where being priced out of the housing market while receiving minimal community amenities and services.
Being able to show the data that highlighted community infrastructure deficit as the binding constraint for the growth challenge helped to put the issue into greater perspective. There are other variables impacting the growth challenge that cannot be forgotten about, but the course helped to define the key constraints and make me think through the tactics on how to develop solutions. This is the area that I wanted to learn more about, in particular appreciating the implementation of the Action Driven Iterative Approach that allows for quick learning and identifying wins for authorizers who are looking for immediate and long-term solutions to the labour growth challenge.
The work through the assignments helped me to develop an initial plan to bring to authorizers at the municipality, port and industry partners to find a common narrative to the challenge and get their buy-in. With the stakeholder mapping and team development for the constraints outlined in the fishbone diagram, I have an initial framework to build off. It will take time to implement this, but I have the initial briefing and supporting documents, data and stakeholder map that can help me kick this process off. Local authorizers will have questions and change the narrative of the growth challenge but being able to get buy-in will help make the engagement more successful, and hold the teams created accountable.
There are no open questions that I have because the purpose of the course was to provide a blueprint to managing the growth challenge. Once implemented, there will be questions about how quickly to pivot and having numerous iterations of developing new ideas, action for implementation, results and learning, and trying it again. Helping to define the growth problem and the corresponding constraints, and providing a blueprint for action is the most important aspect of this course and is recommended for anyone starting off with any growth challenge.
This is a blog series written by the alumni of the Leading Economic Growth Executive Education Program at the Harvard Kennedy School. 72 Participants successfully completed this 10-week online course in May 2023. These are their learning journey stories.