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The nexus of Canada's West Coast economy celebrates a momentous milestone – Delta Optimist

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Need an Apple Watch?

There’s a container terminal handling that.

Fancy a pinch of Grand Marnier?

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There’s a container terminal for that.

Ever wonder where your iPhone comes from?

Again, there’s a container terminal handling that.

As you approach the Tsawwassen Ferry Terminal, those white Star Wars AT-AT walker-looking things are the ship-to-shore cranes at GCT Deltaport – a hub of countless goods coming and going by sea, rail and truck that fuel the Canadian economy to the tune of billions of dollars annually.

Think Canadian Tire, Lululemon, Sanyo, Nike, Ashley Furniture, or Apple – all products associated with those everyday brand names get their start in British Columbia at GCT Deltaport.

Come June 25, GCT Deltaport will celebrate 25 years of operation with a Community Open House. This Open House will showcase some of the largest marine equipment on North America’s West Coast. Picture a tire the size of a small car or a ship-to-shore crane that rises greater than 90 metres into the sky, with jaw-dropping views of the Olympic Mountains, Vancouver Island and Mount Baker.

The event will also feature a charity raffle, free food, live entertainment, terminal tours, kids’ activities and opportunities to check out equipment.

“I’m really looking forward to connecting with the community, explaining what we do and the importance of our work for the Canadian economy,” says Daniel Howell, vice president of operations for GCT Deltaport. “I’d like people to get a feel for who we are. We’re a very hard-working, collaborative and diverse team.”

For Mike McLellan, the anniversary represents a full-circle journey. Now GCT’s vice president of project development, McLellan was there on Day 1 of operations – it was a Sunday on June 8, 1997.

That first ship, the APL President Truman, saw 1,400 boxes handled. Today, GCT Deltaport handles, on average, about 4,200 boxes on and off—per ship visit.

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Ariel shot of GCT Deltaport. Photo via GCT Deltaport Container Terminal.

“We’ve come so far in 25 years, from 1400 boxes in June of 1997, to a point where we’re continuing to grow and expand through new and innovative projects, handling some of the largest vessels operating in these trade lanes. I’m very proud of that fact,” McLellan says.

Fast-forward to today, and GCT Deltaport is an economic driver for the region– and a made-in-B.C. success story – by any metric.

GCT Deltaport spends $30 million in the local economy each year and provides 4.7 million hours of employment across the province. The dollar value going in and out of the terminal on an annual basis is nearing $3 billion.

Almost anything coming from China, Japan or the Far East arrives at GCT Deltaport and makes its way across Metro Vancouver, Canada and points through the U.S. Midwest, including Chicago and Detroit.

The items going out, on the other hand, include some of Canada’s most important natural resources: grain from the Prairies, as well as semi-finished wood products, pulp and lumber from the B.C. Interior.

“We are majority Canadian-owned and headquartered here in Vancouver. We have a proud 115-year history and 25 years in Delta. We are one of Canada’s largest waterfront employers, and we continue to grow that employee base,” Howell says.

While the tenets of safety, pride and professionalism guide what happens on the job, GCT Deltaport also puts a concerted and sustained emphasis on environmental stewardship.

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Snapshot of the current fully electrified Intermodal Railyard at GCT Deltaport. Photo: GCT Deltaport Container Terminal.

The Terminal was recently retrofitted entirely with LED lighting, which is energy-efficient, cost-effective and improves safety while reducing light pollution; EV charging stations have been installed for employee vehicles; shore power has been introduced at Berth 3 so ships can plug in, and anti-idling technology is being piloted for machinery across the terminal.

Absolute emission tracking data shows a 14% drop from 2014 to 2021, equating to 18.6 million fewer kilometres driven by a passenger vehicle.

A recently conducted Green Marine audit, tracking environmental sustainability across hundreds of North American ports, saw GCT Deltaport score some of the highest marks on the continent.

“We undertake these types of initiatives to demonstrate our commitment to sustainability, not only to our stakeholders and employees, but importantly to the communities around us in the Greater Lower Mainland, including the Tsawwassen First Nation and the Musqueam First Nation,” McLellan says. “We must continue to demonstrate to everyone that we’re always considering how we can responsibly grow our business without growing our emissions and environmental impact.”

2022 marks GCT Canada’s 25th year as a member of the Delta community and 115th year of operations on the BC Waterfront. GCT Deltaport is honoured to operate within the traditional territories of the Coast Salish Peoples, and in particular,  the traditional and treaty territory of the Tsawwassen First Nation and Musqueam Indian Band.

For more info about the 25th anniversary celebration, visit bit.ly/3NrZ4kl.

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Economy

Yellen Sounds Alarm on China ‘Global Domination’ Industrial Push – Bloomberg

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US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen slammed China’s use of subsidies to give its manufacturers in key new industries a competitive advantage, at the cost of distorting the global economy, and said she plans to press China on the issue in an upcoming visit.

“There is no country in the world that subsidizes its preferred, or priority, industries as heavily as China does,” Yellen said in an interview with MSNBC Wednesday — highlighting “massive” aid to electric-car, battery and solar producers. “China’s desire is to really have global domination of these industries.”

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Economy

Opinion: The future economy will suffer if Canada axes the carbon tax – The Globe and Mail

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Open this photo in gallery:

Poilievre holds a press conference regarding his “Axe the Tax” message from the roof a parking garage in St. John’s on Oct.27, 2023.Paul Daly/The Canadian Press

Kevin Yin is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail and an economics doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley.

The carbon tax is the single most effective climate policy that Canada has. But the tax is also an important industrial strategy, one that bets correctly on the growing need for greener energy globally and the fact that upstart Canadian companies must rise to meet these needs.

That is why it is such a shame our leaders are sacrificing it for political gains.

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The fact that carbon taxes address a key market failure in the energy industry – polluters are not incentivized to consider the broader societal costs of their pollution – is so well understood by economists that an undergraduate could explain its merits. Experts agree on the effectiveness of the policy for reducing emissions almost as much as they agree on climate change itself.

It is not just that pollution is bad for us. That a patchwork of policies supporting clean industries is proliferating across the United States, China and the European Union means that Canada needs its own hospitable ecosystem for clean-energy companies to set up shop and eventually compete abroad. The earlier we nurture such industries, the more benefits our energy and adjacent sectors can reap down the line.

But with high fixed costs of entry and non-negligible technological hurdles, domestic clean energy is still at a significant disadvantage relative to fossil fuels.

A nuclear energy company considering a reactor project in Canada, for example, must contend with the fact that the upfront investments are enormous, and they may not pay off for years, while incumbent oil and gas firms benefit from low fixed costs, faster economies of scale and established technology.

The carbon tax cannot address these problems on its own, but it does help level the playing field by encouraging demand and capital to flow toward where we need it most. Comparable policies like green subsidies are also useful, but second-best; they weaken the government’s balance sheet and in certain cases can even make emissions worse.

Unfortunately, these arguments hold little sway for Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives, who called for a vote of no-confidence on the dubious basis that the carbon tax is driving the cost-of-living crisis. Nor is it of much consequence to provincial leaders, who have fought the federal government hard on implementing the tax.

Not only is this attack a misleading characterization of the tax’s impact, it is also a deeply political gambit. Most expected the vote to fail. Yet by centering the next election on the carbon tax debate, Mr. Poilievre is hedging against the possibility of a new Liberal candidate, one who lacks the Trudeau baggage but still holds the line on the tax.

With the reality of inflation, a housing crisis and a general atmosphere of Trudeau-exhaustion, Mr. Poilievre has plenty of ammunition for an election campaign that does not leave our climate and our clean industries at risk. The temptation to do what is popular is ever-present in politics. Leadership is knowing when not to.

Nor are the Liberals innocent on this front. The Trudeau government deserves credit for pushing the tax through in the first place, and for structuring it as revenue-neutral. But the government’s attempt to woo Atlantic voters with the heating oil exemption has eroded its credibility and opened a vulnerable flank for Conservative attacks.

Thus, Canadian businesses are faced with the possibility of a Conservative government which has promised to eliminate the tax altogether. This kind of uncertainty is a treacherous environment for nascent companies and existing companies on the precipice of investing billions of dollars in clean tech and processes, under the expectation that demand for their fossil fuel counterparts are being kept at bay.

The tax alone is not enough; the government and opposition need to show the private sector that it can be consistent about this new policy regime long enough for these green investments to pay off. Otherwise, innovation in these much-needed technologies will remain stagnant in Canada, and markets for clean energy will be dominated by our more forward-thinking competitors.

A carbon tax is not a panacea for our climate woes, but it is central to any attempt to protect a rapidly warming planet and to develop the right businesses for that future. We can only hope that the next generation of Canadian leaders will have a little more vision.

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Economy

Business leaders say housing biggest risk to economy: KPMG survey – BNN Bloomberg

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Business leaders see the housing crisis as the biggest risk to the economy, a new survey from KPMG Canada shows.

It found 94 per cent of respondents agreed that high housing costs and a lack of supply are the top risk, and that housing should be a main focus in the upcoming federal budget. The survey questioned 534 businesses.

Housing issues are forcing businesses to boost pay to better attract talent and budget for higher labour costs, agreed 87 per cent of respondents. 

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“What we’re seeing in the survey is that the businesses are needing to pay more to enable their workers to absorb these higher costs of living,” said Caroline Charest, an economist and Montreal-based partner at KPMG.

The need to pay more not only directly affects business finances, but is also making it harder to tamp down the inflation that is keeping interest rates high, said Charest.

High housing costs and interest rates are straining households that are already struggling under high debt, she said.

“It leaves household balance sheets more vulnerable, in particular, in a period of economic slowdown. So it creates areas of vulnerability in the economy.”

Higher housing costs are themselves a big contributor to inflation, also making it harder to get the measure down to allow for lower rates ahead, she said. 

Businesses have been raising the alarm for some time. 

A report out last year from the Ontario Chamber of Commerce also emphasized how much the housing crisis is affecting how well businesses can attract talent. 

Almost 90 per cent of businesses want to see more public-private collaboration to help solve the crisis, the KPMG survey found.

“How can we work bringing all stakeholders, that being governments, not-for-profit organizations and the community and the private sector together, to find solutions to develop new models to deliver housing,” said Charest.

“That came out pretty strong from our survey of businesses.”

The federal government has been working to roll out more funding supports for other levels of government, and introduced measures like a GST rebate for rental housing construction, but it only has limited direct control on the file. 

Part of the federal funding has been to link funding to measures provinces and municipalities adopt that could help boost supply. 

The vast majority of respondents to the KPMG survey supported tax measures to make housing payments more affordable, such as making mortgage interest tax deductible, but also want to maintain the capital gains tax exemption for a primary residence.

The survey of companies was conducted in February using Sago’s Methodify online research platform. Respondents were business owners or executive-level decision makers.

About a third of the leaders are at companies with revenue over $500 million, about half have revenue between $100 million and $500 million, with the rest below. 

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 27, 2024.

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