Vancouver's Clouded Vision
Judging by Daniel Muzyka’s attempt to chart a brighter future for the Vancouver region, you can’t get there from here. At least, not in this clouded city's vision.
Eight years ago, Muzyka arrived in Vancouver to take command of the business school at UBC. Muzyka, recruited from the prestigious INSEAD business school in France, intended great things for the Sauder School of Business and its hometown, Vancouver. Admittedly he’d been warned Vancouver lacked a sense of purpose, a focus on its economic and social future. He recalls a colleague lamenting that the city and region “resembled a talented, attractive teenager at the age of 35, still living at home.” Undeterred, Muzyka threw himself into building up his school and his new community, and in 2005 he was elected chair of the Vancouver Board of Trade. It was the first time an academic with vast international perspective had led the 110-year-old board, whose huge downtown membership makes it the heavyweight among chambers of commerce across the Lower Mainland.
In his inaugural speech as board chair on June 16, 2005, Muzyka spoke passionately about Vancouver needing a vision, a sense of purpose that would inspire all its citizens. “We need to look beyond 2010. I think we should be asking what will Vancouver look like in 2025,” he opined. Vibrant cities around the world, like smart businesses, do these things. They engage their public. They focus everyone on the future they want, find their shared values and commit to making it happen. A common goal guides everyone’s efforts in delivering social, economic and environmental benefits, explained Muzyka. It helps senior governments focus their decisions and funding. A declared vision makes clear to the world why a place is right for investment, migration and commitment. It creates a crucial competitive advantage.
Muzyka launched the board of trade into leading the creation of a Vancouver vision. By November 2005, he and a handful of board members publicly sketched out some concepts to emphasize goals in areas such as entrepreneurship, education, the arts, ethnic integration and global connectivity. These would be among the points to be discussed widely among citizens and business and community leaders, items to prioritize and then focus on achieving. Something to look forward to, something to energize Vancouver the way Expo 86 did.
But after the initial excitement of creating the forward-thinking plan, Muzyka was disappointed. Since then he’s discovered that Vancouver suffers from myopia.
Two years after its announcement as a board-of-trade project, Muzyka’s visioning initiative is still struggling for enthusiasts to shape it, has attracted zero in funding and is virtually unknown to the public. Members of the board have not flocked to get involved in the brainstorming at the early stages. An advisory committee including a few faces from TransLink, Vancouver International Airport, Surrey Board of Trade, the GVRD and the Vancouver Foundation has met only three times. “It’s too early to say where [the visioning] is going,” says Vancouver Board of Trade managing director Darcy Rezac. “It won’t be done in two years.”
Muzyka’s is just one of many failed attempts to create a cohesive vision for the region’s economic future. Another effort, the Greater Vancouver Economic Council (GVEC), is a year behind its November 2006 deadline to hire a prestigious CEO and 15 staff members to handle a proposed $2-million-a-year regional prosperity planning and promotion fund. Launched in 2004, the GVEC’s steering committee was carefully structured to include suburban and city politicians and business leaders. But they’ve failed to pry any bit of a recommended $40-million endowment fund from Ottawa and Victoria.
No Vancouver company has stepped up with sufficient funds to float the GVEC. Nor is any local political body interested in taking on regional economic development. Despite – or perhaps because of – the GVEC’s crippled status, the GVRD, the governing council of the 21 regional municipalities, this year dumped all strategizing about regional economic development in the GVEC’s lap rather than address it directly.
Muzyka, still the dean of the UBC business school, has not given up hope. During the two years since he first unveiled the idea of Vancouver finding a vision, Muzyka has learned many important things, including that the region suffers from a lack of leadership. He estimates it will take another two years to get to the point of even beginning a public conversation about what metro Vancouver could look like in 20 years. He’s learning to take the long view.
Other observers of Vancouver aren’t even sure such a vision is possible. “There has to be a need, and there has to be leadership,” says Gordon Price, a former Vancouver city councillor and head of SFU’s city-focused public programs. There are almost no public champions of a metropolitan Vancouver vision because of parochial politics, and the province is unwilling to promote any such concept, says Price. “My hunch is that the conditions may not be right.” He adds that the Vancouver Board of Trade might not succeed.
There’s little doubt that the metropolitan Vancouver region needs some far-sightedness. On the economic front, the 2010 Olympic Winter Games created construction jobs and promises tourism benefits, but beyond that the future is clouded. The current B.C. economic boom is still based on the traditional trickle-down benefits of backcountry resource industries, and the pine beetle has destroyed any hope of sustaining forestry’s benefits into the next decade.
The Vancouver region is overwhelmingly a service centre for the hinterlands and a place of consumption rather than production, according to new research by the city-based Vancouver Economic Development Commission (VEDC). The Lower Mainland ranks ninth out of 10 regions in B.C. in exports per capita. The much-touted new economies such as biotechnology and new media are still relatively small. The head-office exodus continues. Greater Vancouver, with its shockingly below-average median family income – it ranks 22 out of 27 regions across Canada – urgently needs to “diversify and strengthen our export base, increase productivity and create a climate that attracts and retains business investment,” according to the VEDC’s Benchmark research report released June 12, 2007.
Alarming words, but hardly unfamiliar. Analysts have been pointing to the weakness of the regional economy and calling for coordinated action to generate new economic development for more than a decade.
According to Vancouver city councillor Peter Ladner, it’s hard to get attention when the economy’s on fire. “But all booms end, and when you look beyond real-estate speculations and one-time Olympic construction, our productivity is declining, our research-driven high-growth ‘new’ industries are lagging behind their competitors and head-office employment is declining,” he warns. “The foundations of all this growing wealth, they’re shaky at best.”
It’s not just the region’s economic future that’s at stake. On the social side, a study of public attitudes and experts’ analyses released by the Vancouver Foundation last year rated most social amenities and issues as less than first class. The foundation, the largest community charity in Canada, particularly cited the rich-poor gap, housing, minorities’ inclusion, citizen volunteerism and safety as serious concerns. A better-balanced or sustainable society “assumes a certain level of equality among all residents and growth that is compatible with the harmonious evolution of civil society,” added a similar report by the Canadian Policy Research Networks, prepared for the city and the foundation. “Threats to social sustainability in Vancouver are real and imminent,” it went on. “There is a compelling need for local action to raise public awareness, influence national and provincial policy agendas” and better coordinate public, private and non-profit efforts to work together. “Otherwise Vancouver may be at risk of pervasive urban decay and social exclusion in the coming years.”
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