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
ABACUS DATA AND THE BC CHAMBER OF COMMERCE. NUMBERS MAY NOT ADD UP TO 100 DUE TO ROUNDING FEBRUARY 2019 BCBUSINESS 37 qualifying for tax credit certification contributed a record $3.4 billion to the provincial economy, according to government agency Creative BC. Cameron-Inglis says there's plenty more demand from companies that want to work here. With the Lower Mainland's film industry hub nearing capacity, he sees an opportunity for other regions to keep things moving. To that end, Cameron-Inglis has invested $3 million of his own money in Mastermind. The company, whose parent is a Kamloops Chamber of Commerce member, employs 30 full-time staff through its various businesses, and last January it began offering applied training. As of Decem- ber, Mastermind had grown the ranks of those registered with the Thompson-Nicola Film Com- mission's database of crew qualified to work on a union set from less than 100 to more than 300, Cameron-Inglis says. Thanks to B.C.'s strong digital arts sector, our film industry is better positioned than many of its North American counterparts to leverage video game and other innovative technologies for production, he believes. But Cameron-Inglis wants all B.C. taxpayers to share in the rewards from provincial film and TV tax credits that mostly enrich the Lower Mainland. "If we're talking about the future growth of the industry," he says, "the only way we're going to be able to tap into it more and double the capacity of British Columbia is to start looking at other regions like the B.C. Interior and what we're doing here, and sup- porting that." A time zone away from Kamloops in the East Kootenay village of Canal Flats, a whole new community of the future is taking shape. Entrepreneur Brian Fry and his business partner, Tim Dufour, sold RackForce Networks, their Kelowna-based cloud services firm, in 2015. That year the Columbia Basin Trust introduced them to Brian Fehr, chair of Prince George–headquartered BID Group, who had made his fortune through sawmill automation. Fehr wanted to get into the data centre business, so in 2017 he bought the shuttered sawmill and more than 1,000 acres in Canal Flats, with a plan to build an entire town around the idea. The result was the Columbia Lake Technology Center (CLTC), whose ventures include a fabrication shop making parts for automated sawmills on behalf of BID Group; and PodTech Innovation, founded by Fry and Dufour, which builds compact, prefabricated data centres that store infor- mation for technologies such as artificial intelligence and virtual reality. In December, 71 people worked at the CLTC, a member of the Columbia Valley Chamber of Commerce. When the mill in the village of about 700 shut down, it employed 75. New housing is being built, with live-work spaces, shops, restaurants and an encircling canal to fol- low. The data centres run on hydro power, so they have a small carbon footprint. Their heat will become part of a district energy loop for greenhouses and other buildings. To make a viable community, CLTC chief executive Lorri Fehr wants the population to grow to 2,000. In rural areas, Fehr says, data storage providers usu- ally come in, grab the energy, hire few people and sit there. "We have an incredible commitment to rural B.C. and the people in rural B.C.," she asserts, noting that PodTech units can be moved to other towns. "We see Canal Flats as a model for B.C. and, indeed, rural areas across the country. Because so many of our communities have been dependent on a single resource, and we want to switch that out." Rural communities can also help urban B.C. maintain its edge. Fibre optics, abundant energy and affordable housing make them an option for talent-strapped com- panies in Vancouver and elsewhere, CLTC co-founder Fry says. "We think constantly about how we can grow these centres and how we can create opportunities for them, rather than what typically the story is, that these small towns are all getting smaller and losing opportuni- ties to the bigger city centres." n OVERSEAS MIGRATION When the BC Chamber of Commerce asked its members if the province is an appealing place for foreign companies to invest, the proportion who disagreed doubled over the previous year STRONGLY AGREE AGREE DISAGREE STRONGLY DISAGREE 2017 2018 22% 13% 60% 53% 13% 28% 4% 6%