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How to swim with the sharks
In business, management gurus say, it takes five years either to swim with the sharks or get eaten by them. This June, Francis P. McGuire marks his fifth anniversary heading the federal government organization that, among other things, closely monitors the monsters and minnows of the Atlantic Canadian economy.
“I have good news and I have bad news,” he laughs sharply into the phone from his office at the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (ACOA) in Moncton, N.B. “Five years ago, our biggest weaknesses were aging workers and lagging digitization. They still are. The difference now is 30 per cent of businesses here seem to get that.”
Somebody once asked me what happens if we have fewer people [in the economy]. It probably doesn’t matter as long as they are richer people.
The bad news, apparently, is the other 70 per cent. “Some people listen and some don’t,” he said. “But we’re going to end up with an industrial base that’s going to be much more automated than ever. The people working in it are going to be more skilled than ever.”
“You’re just not going to be able to retrain [many of] the 60-year-olds,” he said bluntly. “Eventually, they’re all going to go on old-age security or live off the pensions they have. That’s just reality. You have to be hard-headed.”
Certainly, few would accuse McGuire—a former deputy minister of economic development in New Brunswick’s Frank McKenna government (1985-1997) and president and CEO of Major Drilling Group International Inc. (2000-2015)—of a bleeding heart. Since he assumed the top job at ACOA in 2017, he has nudged the benign, business-granting agency into a lean, mean, goals-setting machine geared to support young, skilled workers and nimble, tech-savvy enterprises who want to compete, from Atlantic Canada, with anyone anywhere in the world. And he has no plans to stop. “My message is that this is just the beginning of the voyage,” he said. “This is going to take a decade, even though I might not see it to fruition.”
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