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
36 BCBUSINESS FEBRUARY 2019 KYLA BROWN PHOTOGRAPHY population as B.C., and in a single generation it's pulled itself from relative poverty to the top ranks of European economies. It got there partly thanks to IDA Ireland, an autonomous agency that has concentrated on attracting FDI since the mid-1990s. "One of the important things that Ireland has done is make foreign direct investment a top priority," says Dietz's Vancouver colleague, McKinsey partner Keith Martin. With a $200-million annual budget, IDA Ireland targets specific industries, including life sciences, food and technology. "The European headquarters of a lot of the major tech companies are in Dublin," says Martin, who is Irish. IDA Ireland clients, which are mostly multi- nationals, supply about 10 percent of the nation's jobs. B.C. has 17 trade and investment offices in Asia, the U.S. and Europe, but there's no provincial equivalent to IDA Ireland. Minister Ralston says his office works closely with the feds' new Invest in Canada agency. "But I think there are opportunities to do better in that space, for sure, and that's something that I'm working on." LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION "Is B.C. losing its competitive edge?" asks Peter Cameron- Inglis. "Not if I have anything to say about it." Cameron-Inglis is president and CEO of Mastermind Studios, a Kamloops-based video production agency and film industry incubator whose facilities include a soundstage, office space and an equipment rental department. "We want to see the cluster of the motion picture industry grow into the B.C. Interior, specifically the Thompson-Nicola region," he says of Mastermind, which launched in 2010. In the 2017-18 fiscal year, film and TV productions "We need less bureaucracy, more velocity, more transparency. Trans Mountain is the obvious example, but resource develop- ment is not easy in British Columbia" – Scott Thomson, president and CEO, Finning International POD PEOPLE Lorri Fehr and Brian Fry are turning the Kootenay village of Canal Flats into a tech town whose ventures include a maker of prefab data centres