Greater Halifax Partnership

From Greater Halifax Partnership’s downtown office overlooking the city’s bustling harbour, president and CEO Paul Kent effuses passion for the place he calls home and the businesses he and his team work to support.

With 32 years experience as a manager and consultant in government and the private sector, and as the CEO of a vibrant technology firm, Kent was a client of the Partnership long before taking the helm. Even then he remembers being intrigued by its potential in its formative years.

“I was struck at that time at what a novel idea it was, a bold idea, that it might be possible to create an entity which would represent the interest of government, the interest of business, in a focused way such that you create the right climate, the right environment for the economic development of this capital city.”

Established in 1996 in the wake of an amalgamation that united four abutting municipalities into the Halifax Regional Municipality (HRM) “supercity,” the Partnership is a unique private-public model of investment and knowledge sharing that has caught on and been duplicated elsewhere in North America.

More than 130 of HRM’s most influential businesses and all three levels of government invest in the partnership. With their support The Partnership leverages municipal tax dollars to build business confidence, assisting them to achieve stability and growth, access research and information on economic trends, and to remove roadblocks.

The Partnership focuses on five areas of economic development: business retention and expansion, business development, building confidence, research, and trade development. In Nova Scotia, 80 per cent of new jobs come from existing businesses. In the HRM, this includes focusing on industry sectors that offer significant potential for the economy, such as life sciences, digital technology, transportation and logistics, advanced manufacturing and aerospace.

“It’s very important to realize that it’s not just lifestyle,” says Kent of what makes Halifax a desirable place to live and work. “We’re not just ‘Canada’s Ocean Playground’. We’re a darn good place to do business from. We have some of the smartest people on the planet. We have an array of business options and partners that are pretty enviable. We have a size which is workable. We’re not this massive blob that is a very large multi-national city. We actually know one another and can work together. We have a value system which is also enviable because it facilitates collaborative behavior and values it. We have the characteristics of success here. We can go home at night and enjoy the environment and come to work in the morning and it’s competitive, its high demand, exhilarating. It’s real.”

A pill bottle sits on a table in Kent’s office blazoned with the term SmartBusiness, a prescription of sorts for the local economy. A business retention and expansion initiative, SmartBusiness helps HRM businesses access new markets and talent, assess location needs and the resources, research and support they require to grow.

SmartBusiness has produced results. Since June of 2004 the team at the Partnership has conducted over 1,800 interviews, generated over 1,000 referrals to the partnership’s Action Team that resulted in 90% of files being closed, and the creation or rentention of more than 5,000 jobs. The program also won the 2006 Economic Developers Association of Canada Economic Development Achievement of the Year Award and the 2005 Business Retention and Expansion International Best Business Retention and Expansion Initiative.

“We’ve had lots of little victories. It can be something as simple as ‘help me with this unexpected issue which is really in my way,’ right up to ‘I’m trying to figure out how to approach company X about partnering with me on this big international opportunity, can you help me broker that conversation?’ And we do.”

In 2010 the Partnership is developing an economic strategy that will help to guide the region’s economic growth through the next 5 years. The development of this strategy is bringing together more than 250 people from government and the private sector to determine what has been working and what’s needed to move the city forward.

“One of my hopes in this strategy is that we confirm, affirm and agree to promote Halifax as an international city, Canada’s east coast gateway, a hub city which is economically proud and a major component of the success of the region. I’ll go home at night feeling pretty good that Halifax is living up to it’s expectation.”