bcbusiness.ca FEBRUARy 2018 BCBusiness 31
V
al Litwin enjoys telling a
story about a meal he had
this past summer in Tum-
bler Ridge in northeastern
B.C. And no, it's not to com-
plain that his eggs were a
little more over-easy than
he would have liked. "I had breakfast
with the president of a metallurgical
coal mine and the facility manager
of a wind farm," recalls Litwin, presi-
dent and
CEO of BCBusiness partner
the BC Chamber of Commerce. "And
the wind farm guy said, 'If only
people understood I need a couple
tonnes of his metallurgical coal to
make each wind turbine I have.'"
Since Litwin took the helm at the
BC Chamber in late 2016, he's tried to foster har-
mony between the province's technolo‡y-driven
urban industries and its more traditional rural
jobs. It hasn't always been a simple task, given the
perception that big cities such as Vancouver and
Victoria function separately from the resource-
based economy in the Interior and the north.
"Where there's a gap, and where the unhealthy
narrative has unfolded, is that perhaps the average
person on the street doesn't understand how con-
nected they are," Litwin says. "If you're at a Šve-star
restaurant in Vancouver and your perfectly done
medium-rare steak reaches your table, you may
not know that the beef came from the Thompson-
Okanagan region, or that the natural gas that ‹ame-
broiled it came from the northeast."
Those who work in industries
that depend on this rural-urban
interplay know how much the two
economies need each other. That's a
fairly new development. Just ask Dan
Baxter, the BC Chamber's director
of policy development, government
and stakeholder relations, who
joined the advocacy group in 2013.
"When I Šrst started, the relation-
ship felt more combative; it was us
versus them," Baxter says. "Some
parts of the province don't necessar-
ily feel they get their fair share, and
that's obviously a fair conversation,
but I think more and more people
are coming at it from a point of view
now of 'How do we grow together?'"
Bruce Anderson, chair of Ottawa-based Abacus
Data Inc., oversaw a poll of some 870 BC Chamber
members last November. "In the past, you could
see some cleavages between people who live in the
smaller and mid-sized communities in the north-
ern and eastern parts of the province who would
think that all of the beneŠts were skewing toward
the Lower Mainland and parts of the Island," the
veteran pollster says of the annual Collective
Perspective survey. "[Now] the numbers are pretty
consistent in every region of the province."
For example, the proportion of respondents in
northern B.C. who called their business outlook
for the next three to Šve years good or very good
(67 per cent) closely tracked that in the Lower Main-
land (78 per cent).
Two Economies,
One Provınce
URBAN AND
RURAL B.C. AREN'T
SEPARATE
WORLDS. AS WE
LEARNED By TAP-
PiNG THE BC
ChamBer of
CommerCe NET-
WORK, THEy'RE
iNCREASiNGLy
iMPORTANT TO
EACH OTHER
urban.rural.
b y N A T H A N C A D D E L L + N I C K R O C K E L
