Former mayor of Granisle Frederick Clarke is concerned with the current state of northern B.C.’s economy and he’s been touring around the northwest, visiting village and town councils to offer up a solution.
His goal is to create a regional innovation centre, where research and development can take place and startup businesses or people with innovative ideas can go for guidance and support.
The innovation centre’s main goal would be to help the northern economy diversify to the point where primary industries are less of an economic focal point.
“The general idea is to promote the fact that we need secondary and tertiary industries,” Clarke said.
“Because what history tells us is that mines, sawmills and pulp mills close. If you are a one or two-horse town, you are in trouble.”
Clarke speaks from experience. His home of Granisle was one of the fastest growing towns in the province in the 1970s, boasting a population of 3,000 at its height. Now, 40 years later with all of the mines shut down, Granisle’s population hovers around 300.
“It’s a shell of a community now. The last mine closed 25 years ago and we’ve never recovered.”
Though Granisle’s mine closures and subsequent population decrease are an extreme example, you don’t have go too far to find smaller examples of closures affecting people in the north.
With the recent Houston Forest Products and NewPro shutdown announcements in Houston and Smithers, and more boom-then-bust pipeline projects on the way, it’s an issue that hits close to home.
Clarke is travelling to as many community councils, and First Nations communities in the north as he can, offering them a presentation and inviting them to come to a future meeting on the subject, where the idea can be discussed further in depth.
“We are asking them to make a resolution that they would support an organizational meeting.
“In order to do that we need to get all the communities together and to work it out. Something has to be in it for each community.”
Village of Telkwa mayor Carmen Graf said he is open to the idea.
“We are always looking for new ways to do things,” Graf said.
“If this is a project that can help grow business, then of course we will look into it.”
Clarke believes funding for his idea shouldn’t be a problem, it’s just a matter of priority.
“If you think it’s a priority to develop your secondary industries, then it will happen. If it’s not, then it won’t.
“We have a beautiful park in Granisle that cost $600,000 to build.
“In this instance we had no choice but to put the money into a park, but if you took the same commitment to development in the region, if you took the scale of our town and extrapolated it to the 37,000 people that live in the region, you would have $64 million.”
No word yet on when the next meeting will take place, or how many communities will take part.