With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1071224
FEBRUARY 2019 BCBUSINESS 31 DARREN HULL and customers, and its emerging tech hub supplies talent for Caterpillar dealer Finning's digital division, Thomson explains. He also expects Finning's B.C. busi- ness to grow at higher-than-GDP levels over the next several years, thanks to major capital projects like LNG Canada and demand for natural resources. But he sees serious challenges: taxation, access to labour and ease of doing business. "We need less bureaucracy, more velocity, more transparency," argues Thomson, whose 13,000 employees make Finning, the world's top seller of Caterpillar equipment and parts, one of the few truly big companies with a global head office in B.C. "Trans Mountain is the obvious example, but resource development is not easy in British Columbia." As proof of what happens when other markets become more attractive, he points to the provincial lum- ber industry, which has lost business to the U.S. South. "That's a warning signal for the B.C. government that companies make decisions really quickly and capital can move very quickly," Thomson says. "You always have to be focused on making sure the labour pools are available and making sure your competitiveness relative to other markets is maintained." The BC Chamber of Commerce caught the same unease with its latest Collective Perspective member survey. In the annual poll by Ottawa-based Abacus Data, 79 percent of almost 900 people surveyed last fall said business costs had climbed in the past year. Although nearly all respondents agreed that their business was in decent shape, compared to 2017 about 10 percent fewer rated prospects for the next three to five years as very good or good. The proportion who expected their business to grow in the next five years fell roughly the same amount, to 73 percent. Just 15 percent said that their confidence in the B.C. economy had improved over the previous year, versus DIGGING DEEP In Kelowna, Emil Anderson Construction CEO Mike Jacobs must find a way to pay new provincial taxes