B.C.'s Link to Arizona Real Estate
When many British Columbians hear “Arizona,” they think golf and time-shares. But there’s much more than that linking our two jurisdictions.
In Arizona – with an unemployment rate hovering just below 10 per cent, up from four per cent in 2007; where one in 169 households received a default notice in May, the second-highest foreclosure rate in the U.S. and more than twice the national average; and where the state’s total debt load now tops $10 billion, five times what it was a decade ago – much policy attention and public anger is now being directed southward. Cheap labour from illegal Mexicans and cheap goods from maquiladoras are taking jobs from hard-working Arizonans – or so goes the argument. Mexico has become the whipping boy upon which populist fury can beat unencumbered. And yet as far as the future is concerned – where the requisite products, talent and investment capital, the very building blocks of Arizona’s climb from deep recession, might be found – Arizonans would be well advised to look north, well north, for some answers.
That, at least, is the hope expressed by Glenn Williamson when I meet him for breakfast, on a sunny and warm March morning, at the W Hotel in Scottsdale. Williamson, 53, is the founder and CEO of the Canada Arizona Business Council (CABC), a private sector group sanctioned by the Canadian government and the State of Arizona to build trade between the two jurisdictions. Formed in 2004, the CABC – which consists of about 130 by-invite-only members, including Vancouverite Peter Thomas, founder of Century 21 Real Estate Canada Ltd. – helped to increase bilateral trade by just over $1 billion in its first four years of operation (before the recession hit) to $3.2 billion. B.C. represents an estimated $500 million of that total.
“Six years ago, I woke up one morning and said, I know Canada has an influence down here and that it’s bigger than most people think. So I went to the Canadian government and asked, Why aren’t you guys here?” explains Williamson. “They finally agreed to create a presence, but it was going to take a year, so I got a bunch of guys together, we ponied up $600,000 of our own money and created this YPO-type organization.”
Williamson, born to an establishment Anglo family in Montreal (his grandfather, T.H. Atkinson, was briefly chairman of the Royal Bank of Canada in the early ’60s), spent his formative years in Canada, working across the country in the travel-resort business before coming down to Phoenix in 1987 to become senior vice-president of operations at the Vancouver-listed company International Laser Technology. In 2000 Williamson, in partnership with Jonathan Birks (of Montreal’s jewelry-store family), established Nest Ventures LLC, a private-equity firm that works primarily in the biotech, communications, energy and e-finance sectors.
As Williamson explains it, Arizona businesses have a higher interest in Canada these days than in Mexico, and that wasn’t the case six years ago. “The universities here didn’t have any Canadian program; they had Mexican programs. The Department of Commerce had no trade office in Canada; they had three trade offices in Mexico. The governor used to go to Mexico but never went to Canada. We brought the governor up; we brought the mayors up. We managed to create a balance and tap into the fact that Arizona’s growing market wanted to be high-tech. High-tech is Canada, Japan, the U.K.; it’s not Mexico.”
While companies such as Vancouver’s Metrobridge Networks International Inc. and InNexus Biotechnology Inc. and Victoria’s Carmanah Technologies Corp. have a significant presence in the Arizona market today, B.C. businesses historically have made their name and fortune here with natural resources and raw materials. And despite the inroads made by tech and biotech companies, that remains true to this day. Twenty-five B.C.-based mining firms have operations in the Copper State, while the single largest export from Canada to Arizona remains building materials, most of that coming from B.C.
And with those building materials have come western Canadian developers by the planeload, starting in the 1970s with Peter Thomas and continuing today with builders such as Vancouver’s Avenir Group and Anthem Properties and Langley’s WestStone Properties Ltd., each hoping to capitalize on one of the fastest-growing regions in North America.
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