 So, welcome to the webinar, Amenity-Based Rural Development. As Darby mentioned, I'm sorry for more. I'm with the Ministry of Jobs, Tourism and Innovation. The Ministry has been trying to develop a webinar series of topics that might be of interest and relevant to local government staff, officials, and other community leaders across BC. Our hope is that you'll find this webinar series to be an additional link to academia, industry, and government in an accessible and affordable way. As Darby mentioned, the webinar will be recorded today, and you'll be able to access this as an ongoing resource through the Rural BC website. And following today's website steps, we will be seeking your feedback on the webinar today and also asking for your input into future topics. So I'd like to welcome and thank the two presenters that we have today. They're both online. And she's stuck in the call of each one who is the BC Regional Innovation Chair in Tourism and Sustainable Rural Development at Vancouver Island University in Nanaimo. And they took the role in the call of works with colleagues to support rural regions in BC in amenity-based industries like tourism, recreation, and culture. She has advised senior policy makers on rural development and is currently conducting research on three regions of Canada that have long-term success in amenity-based development. Our second presenter is Dr. Michael McLaughlin, who is the lead economist for Rural Future Associates, a provider of rural community development expertise. Michael has been a pioneer in conservation-based economic development in British Columbia since 1998. Rural Future is the first major BC study of the enablers, motivators, and socio-economic implications of amenity-based migration and continues to assist communities to take advantage of new opportunities related to amenity-based economic development. So we thank the two presenters for joining us today. And if we just move to the next slide just outlined today's agenda, we've just done the introduction. So I'm going to be handing it over to Nicole and my students where Nicole will be providing a presentation on amenity-based rural development. How is it? How does it work? And is it for us? And then Michael will be presenting on cluster in the woods development of amenity-based rural economy and then we're going to save considerable time for a dialogue and discussion. So with that, I'm going to hand it over to Nicole. Can everyone hear me okay? Can you find Nicole? Good. All right. Well, thank you for the introduction. Good morning to the... and welcome to the webinar. I heard a few people saying this is their first time. It's their first time for me too. Congratulations on hosting the webinar series and I think based on what I can see from the people on the call, this should be a very good discussion this morning. So I'm pleased to talk a little bit, share a little bit and join my colleague Michael McLaughlin on this particular topic. It's an area that I've been doing some research in for the last couple of years for the federal government and I'll talk a little bit more about that as I go through. But I just wanted to start by saying that the idea of people being attracted to travel, live and work in attractive places in rural Canada is not new. In fact, much of Canada has really been settled that way. So this isn't a real conceptual leap for people to understand it. Similarly, I think based on the people on the call, a number of you are already engaged in activities related to ABRD, as I'm going to call it for short. We need it's another acronym. But I encourage you to think about perhaps what we're going to talk about today. I encourage you to think about ABRD as the more holistic approach for rural development. So with that said, I'm going to sort of move on through. Oh, already I'm getting this off here. I'm trying to remember, Darby, how to move forward. It's the arrow from the bottom left-hand corner of your screen there. It's the arrow pointing down. Ah, yes, sorry. So I'm going to begin by talking a little bit about what is ABRD, where it comes from, and how it differs a little bit from some of the other approaches we're using for rural development. I'm going to spend a little bit of time in the middle talking about rural amenities across the Canadian landscape that could be used if you're using this strategy. Also the audiences for ABRD, and I'll sort of finish by talking about some of the potential impacts that need to be considered by communities and regions going through this. And with that said, I'll hand over to Michael who's going to speak a little bit more about ABRD and its ability to create economies in rural areas with specific reference to some of the work that he's been involved in. And as was highlighted, we're trying to leave lots of time for discussion, so we want to be wrapped up by about 10, 50 or 11 o'clock to leave about a half an hour there. So I'm going to begin by talking a little bit about these dominant agendas in rural Canada. So these aren't unfamiliar to folks. Many of us are talking about issues with rural repopulation of areas that need to do that to attract young families and some areas of Canada are focusing on immigrant populations. Others are managing the pace and growth in the nature of changes. A number are seeking to attract investments, enhancing the climate for either small business success. And a dominant agenda for many is addressing the aging infrastructure and services. So I'm sure those are not unfamiliar with many of the people on this call. I just want to point out, however, that in addressing these issues, we often see different actors at the community or regional level engaged in these strategies, but rarely in a way that brings them all together. And indeed, if you look at this, there are connections between them and one of the things that ABRD tries to do is bring some of these strategies or efforts together. Many have been questioning the best way to support rural development within Canada and internationally, and this is due in large part to realizations that the way we've been going about things has not necessarily been working. Where we used to subsidize sectors, we're now seeing investments in territories, regions, or places where rural areas were seen as places of production, where we used our resources as export goods. We're now seeing them as places where consumption of attractive amenities can occur, thereby reversing the flow of where we import people, ideas, and investment in rural regions. But this is an important paradigm shift that's happening internationally. Certainly our federal government is looking at the potential here, and I think it's a good way to sort of start thinking about perhaps some of the differences in our approach to rural development. Now, why are we looking for new approaches anyway? So one of the reasons is the lack of evidence and success that I mentioned earlier. But the other reason is that despite our tendency to talk about rural areas in a state of decline, there are others that are growing, so they're not homogenous. And when people started to explore why this growth was occurring in rural areas of North America, there was a strong correlation between those that were growing and the presence of amenities. Typically in some of these areas they were outdoor amenities, mountain amenities, and these attracted people, visitation, often tourism, and so there's this speculation that amenities are potentially have the capability to drive rural development growth. So what are amenities and how do they drive growth? So just on this one, the key concept perhaps to remember about amenities is their attractive values. I've got the underlines in red there. And many of these refer to the pleasurable aspects associated to natural and cultural features of rural areas. And they have an attractive value. It motivates people to visit, play, live, and prosper in rural areas. In fact, some say that the only communities to survive within the next 50 years will be those where people vote with their feet, meaning they choose to be in a location due to its attractive values. So amenity-based rural development is the use of these attractive aspects of rural areas and the corresponding values that we derive from them as really the resources for development of rural areas. There's a couple of audiences. So who's attracted to these amenities? And there's typically about three audiences here. In short, visitors, residents, and business investments. And there's been various terms used, lifestyle entrepreneurs, a number of other terms have emerged here. But an important point here, and Michael will speak to this more eloquently, but there is business investment. It comes directly, an economy can be created directly from the amenities. And largely we've seen the tourism industry do this. They valorize those amenities and create economies directly from them. But we also have the potential to use those amenities to indirectly sort of create economies as well. So for example, nowadays you can run your business in Vancouver, but you may choose to live in a rural area where you can actually run your business from there. So this sort of attractive value or added value feature is something that many are trying to figure out how can we attract that creative economy to our area. And a important point on the right is that these amenities may be valued differently by these audiences. This is a really important point because one of the issues with the use of amenities is that people, if they value them differently, you have the potential for conflict. And in a number of cases that we see with amenity migration, which is a subset of AVRD, we've seen a number of those conflicts emerge because of value differences. So how does tourism fit into this big picture? Often tourism has been viewed as a bit of a sector as well. People invest in it the same way they've invested in other sectors. But I'm going to try and get you to see that in AVRD, it plays perhaps a broader role. It's often the front door to most economic development efforts. And partly the reason for this is that people visit a place first, form an impression of it, and then consider relocating or investing. This is often not fully recognized by stakeholders in rural development. The sort of motivator to incorporate tourism has often been through solely economic purposes. Yet if we realize that it has a broader potential and a range of impact, then that's just an important point to keep in mind here. I'm going to move a little bit to what are these amenities. And there is a handout that I'm going to try and navigate to in a moment here too. But the Canadian Rural and Cooperative Secretariat has been investing more to learn about the potential role of AVRD in Canada over the last couple of years. And the first project I did for them last year was they were asking the basic question, so what are the amenities in Canada that rural areas could use to support this? And so this typology is in your handout section in a moment, but I'm just going to kind of go through what the three broader categories are first. Not surprisingly, the first one really are natural amenities. And so these are amenities based on the natural attributes of rural areas, and they include climate, air quality, land, and water. And these provide the scenic settings and materials for work in leisure pursuits of residents. And I'm going to get to how those are valued in some examples in the worksheet in a moment. The second category, and people often don't think of rural areas as cultural venues, but we know that the cultural life in rural areas has a strong attractive value for individuals. But these amenities are based on the cultural context of rural areas, and they include heritage, recreation, and sports. Arts, works, and community. And these serve to enhance the quality of life in rural regions. Where cultural amenities and natural amenities are the drivers for ABRD, system amenities are the enablers. They enable and support rural areas to realize and manage impacts from in-migration enterprise development or tourism. So system amenities are those things such as infrastructure, services, connectivity, and capacity of rural areas to actually be able to transform the attractive value of those cultural and natural amenities into new economies. Before I get into these examples, I just wanted to try and navigate to this handout. So I'm not sure if people have taken a look at that earlier, but I'm going up to this handout section here. This is a very much a shortened version. Let's see if I can grab that. Oh, hey Darby, I may need your help. Hi Nicole, how can I help you? I'm just wanting to get this handout on screen. Let's see how I'm doing here. Can I get it on the screen or do people just look at it on their own? The handout is something they will have to download themselves. Okay, so I'll give folks a moment here to download this rural amenity typology so that you're looking at it. It will take them a few moments to do so. Okay. I can get folks to try and do that for a moment. I can do that. Okay, so it'll be what you're going to be looking at at the table. It's a three-page table and I thought it would just be useful for many of you to have with you after this call in a much bigger report to the federal government. This is what Canada is now using as its typology of amenities for rural development and I think it's a value to you for a number of reasons because it's important that you're probably using a similar idea for what amenities could be as federal and provincial governments seek to support amenity-based rural development. This might be one of the most valuable tools for you to do that. So essentially what it is is just taking the definitions that I just told you about but what I wanted to draw your attention to was the fourth, the fifth column and it's a column that talks about the value, amenity value and I wanted to stress, I wanted to again link this typology to the comment that I made about how amenities are valued differently by those three audiences. So clean air, for example, clean air and air quality is valued for certain reasons. Valued for obviously health access to the outdoors, et cetera, et cetera. If we follow down under land that's valued by individuals for different reasons, biodiversity, steam ring, connection to nature, I won't go through all of these but this value piece is central to you using ADRD because in many ways you have to find out how residents, visitors and businesses value these amenities differently. The sooner you can do that and really understand that the more likely people are going to find common ground in how they're going to protect and promote and valorize those amenities for development. So I won't spend a lot more time on this but I just wanted to flag how this might be useful for you later after the call and I can certainly take any questions on that later as well. So I just wanted to give you three quick examples before I turn over to Michael of some of the examples of ADRD we see in DC and there's some varying, you know people aren't using ADRD as if you look at their economic development plan either finding documents they're not necessarily using this yet. Some areas are using it more fully than others without even really knowing that. So we're really sort of following what the field is doing here. One example however of the use of natural and community amenities to drive population settlement is the example of 108 Mile Ranch and many of you know the story probably of 108 but it's an example of taking a fairly isolated rural area and saying we have lakes and we have miles of trails. We have fishing opportunities. We have a number of activities that can happen on this landscape and we're going to purposely build a community to allow it to infuse the area with new residents and secondary with tourism benefits to drive settlement in that area. The second example I'm just going to highlight is an example of the use of the natural amenities to attract visitors and here we're seeing more and more in rural areas are realizing that they need to work together in regional scope versus the community level scope and this is important for ADRD because people don't necessarily, they'll never really understand what all of the rural communities are in this country. So the more we work together to put regions on the map is the more that allows us to maximize amenities. So this example is the powder highway. You can see on the map there are a number of the operators. So it was involved in valorizing the natural amenities in this area. The mountains and the opportunities for skiing have been working together to put that region on the map in a different way. And the third example is the community of Golden. I'm going to take a look at some of their, they've got a new 2011 community economic development plan. They're almost explicitly using ADRD to integrate all of their various, all the various components of their plan and their economic development approach. They're using their natural and cultural amenities to attract all of those three audiences, visitors, residents and businesses. A couple of the really interesting initiatives are their, you know, relocation program. They're consciously trying to bring people from Golden back to Golden. They have ambassador programs. They have home seeker support. And they have a project come back to try and bring youth back into the community. So I could go on and on. But here's an example of community that we found that is really integrating just throughout. So just a couple of closing comments before I hand over to Michael. And then based migration is a subset. There's lots of, lots of academic attention to migration, the impacts of amenity-based migration. When we bring different people and new people, people who may value our amenities differently than the people already there, it can induce a range of impacts of the landscape that can be positive, which is the ones you were probably seeking, but also negative. And so many of you are aware of those environmental, economic and social-cultural impacts. And these are the things that are causing communities and regions a lot of angst, a lot of time dealing with them. And so if you're using amenities to attract development, it requires some foresight and appropriate planning support. The problem, however, is that most rural communities are not yet equipped to deal with finding consequences of amenity-led rural development. And this explosion and impact has caught many areas unprepared. So the big stressor here, and the third thing I want to remember about ABRD is the need for balance. And so in terms of your actions, if you're using amenities, you're promoting them, yes, but you're also protecting them and you're valorizing them. So we often promote and we create economy things from things, but we let other groups pick up the task of protecting the value of amenities over time. And so the planning support that emerged in this sort of activity needs to be comprehensive enough to see this a little bit more in an integrated fashion. So the challenge for you is coordination and regional collaboration. You have to know what amenities exist in your region, how they're being promoted, protected and valorized, and who is doing that, how are they valued, and by which audience? Right there you can see some sources of potential conflict. Who's involved in various tasks? What planning supports do you have to maintain their attractive value over time? And then you're going to have to discuss things like whose values are a priority because in some communities that may differ. So in my summary comments, ABRD is showing promises and approach. I'm not advocating it. I'm saying that it probably suits some areas more than others and it may integrate, may serve to integrate a lot of the work that many of you are already involved in. It emphasizes attractive value to drive development and it can produce a range of impacts. Therefore, there is this need at that end to be planning and promoting, protecting and valorizing for long-term utility. So I'm just going to leave perhaps with this slide just to promote that we are having a World Tourism Conference if you're not aware of it, April 19th to 21st, and the topic that we've chosen is Amenities, Regional Development and Collaboration. So if you want to head it up to that beautiful one-of-him-nate-mile area, we are more than welcome to join us. So with that said, I'm going to pass things over to my colleague, Michael McLaughlin, and he's going to walk you further down this road. Michael, can you hear me? Hi, Michael. We can hear you just fine. Go ahead. All right. Thank you for waiting for my slides to come up. You'll be using the bottom left-hand corner. Okay. Here you go. I'd like to begin by thanking the team at the Rural Secretariat for making it so easy to participate in the webinar series. And my colleague, Nicole, for inviting me to be a co-presenter. And I'd like to welcome all of you who are attending, and a special hello to the lone participant from Thunder Bay. Hello. Hey, I'm a Lakehead grad. Nice to have you here. I want to... Much of what I will be presenting will echo points that Nicole has presented in overview. And I guess I'll be sort of drilling down into a little bit more. And I'll be really speaking from an economic developer's perspective. I want to begin by, again, a reminder that an advantage-based rural economy is not a new thing. The interesting that the Romans filled Southern France with what we would call second seasonal homes, they called them billows. This first-century fresco from one of them shows a rather wealthy person with his fishing guide, quartz fishing. So it goes back, at least, that far. Nicole has done such a good job in presenting conceptually the conceptual map for ABRD that I feel I can step right in, start talking about the direct economic benefits which she did identify. Direct economic benefits are derived from adding value to the land by creating products out of actual amenities. The reason why I call them direct economic benefits is because they are derived from the actual use. This is an important distinction because economic development is then focused on the amenities. It's a balance between conservation of them and development exploitation of what I call secondary or indirect economic benefits are derived from the migrant enterprises that are attracted because of the amenities and I call these enterprising amenity migrants. The ability to locate your business anywhere is fueling amenity migration. That, in my opinion, is the new factor, BRD, something that the Romans couldn't do. Now, natural and cultural amenities are still the motivation for relocation, but the secondary economic benefits from enterprise are independent. That's crucial from an economic development standpoint because now, economic development is not about managing amenities. It's about managing its emerging. This isn't particularly new. It's been around for a while. We should have had a polling question here. What's the page name? Artemis, Irving, Arnold. Answer at the end of the webinar. The term amenity migration was labeled in 1987. I should point out, as Nicole has done, this is only a part of ABRD. I'm drilling down into this part because this is the part where the new types of commerce are coming from and that's what my introduction is. I would like to go through the milestones in how ABRD has been understood through my own history, the world as a developer. My introduction came in 1999 when I saw research from the United States that showed a correlation between community and county wealth and the conservation gifts. The opposite of this, too. There was a negative correlation between wealth and places that had exploited land. It wasn't just that the resource industry was defined by something new cooking in places. So this is great news. Natural amenities have a value. They attract commerce. So we now have economic rationalization for placing conservation of landscapes into a benefit cost analysis, all of the opportunities. Well then, as years went by, I started to see research which pointed to that had been inundated by many of my colleagues. Sometimes with the consequences of various amenities that attracted them for being degraded and those cultural quality of life values that people came for were also graded. So around that time, we begin to see some communities incorporating an understanding of the many of my colleagues who all have pointed out. And I pointed to Canmore, Alberta. They've been on for about 10 years. I think I've done some work with you. Over the last decade or so, the research has become quite a bit more sophisticated. Researchers have identified a number of factors. These would be mainly the systems amenities that we're referring to, which are very important. Yes, the amenities are important for attracting, but a number of other factors, depending on whether they are in place, will determine types of volume of migration. Yes, and some analysis of these factors, they've seen that different patterns of amenity-driven growth development are in place. Rural appeal has always existed. So a good question is, what has changed that enables people to move their place of work to the countryside? Research has shown that high amenity areas commonly have as many, as much as 40%, businesses owned by the people who first came, tourists, drawings, or two relatives. And it's the ability to do business from anywhere that drives enterprising migration. And I see this as a kind of equalizer for rural commerce. See, the jobs have to be in the town and the cities. They don't have to be anymore. It's a tremendous opportunity. And global business models have changed. Global commerce has become highly flexible, acquisition of professional services, and in the ability of providers to offer services in combined service. So your market is everywhere. Terms around the world outsource things they might have done certainly before. Professionals can get together, form a team, meet the needs of a group, but you could not do these. And there's the demographic driver to amenity migration in the past. It's largely seen as a senior's generation, baby boomers. My own work here, especially on the Sunshine Coast, shows that they're being supplemented now by the young, the restless is a good thing. So this is for background. They're here. They're forming new rural economies. How come in economic development do we assist? And I see economic development enhancing of the competition of sectors, attracting new investment. Do we have the economic development models? Do we need... Yeah, sorry. Here, let's talk about the area and the object which I'm going to describe, which is our intelligence services. I don't know if you can see my cursor on your screen, but we're talking about the lower Sunshine Coast, Vancouver down here in the south. There's House Sound. If you know it, take it out. If you know if you can see my cursor, stand up to Jervis Inlet, include the town of the District of Seychelles. This is a strip about 90 kilometers long with about 29,000 people. There are hundreds of small knowledge-based businesses scattered across this whole region. And our innovative starting point was to ask, can we stimulate development of a cluster in our knowledge-based sector? Now, why would we want to do that? It's because clusters, formerly known as agglomerates, they occur because of the competitive advantages they bring, and the competitive advantages have come from proximity in the past. The first place they attract is the services they need, even a bundle of businesses that need the same services, and those services come to them, and typically those have been transportation, power, financing, sales, and marketing. In rural areas, it's probably internet bandwidth, which is the crucial service that one would want to attract. The members of a cluster use each other's services. Clusters create a pool of expertise unique to that industry. Nobody does it all, so they use each other's services. Even more importantly, within clusters, members are able to combine their services to take on work that they couldn't have, kind of in a way to extend their business reach and increase their competitiveness. So those are the three major economic reasons for cluster formation, which happens naturally in pre-enterprise economies. There's other factor, and that's the social-professional connections. People like to hang out with people of similar backgrounds in education and interest. And that has typically come in the bricks-and-mortar side, and I listed some of the types of industries in which clusters have formed. Now, the profile of our Sunshine Coast intelligence services cluster is a group of knowledge-based industries. There are several hundred of these. The majority of them do business online, via an online medium. And importantly for the cluster development, the medium that enables them to locate in rural areas also connects them. The group is composed of, I should mention that these are a source of export dollars. The membership include a wide range of highly skilled professionals. I've listed some of them there. And of very important value, we can call this a sustainable sector in the sense of having a small footprint. Many of these people don't even drive to work, and they probably don't have a whole lot more lights on when they're doing work than they're otherwise at home. Not to say that they're all at home, but that's a majority of them, and this is a feature of rural economies. So here's what we're trying to do. We're trying to link businesses that do business online via this online medium, and they're connected through it. So what we've done is we've adapted a social media technology. That technology is about creating virtual communities, so it provides a suitable tool. However, this has to be a business tool and function like one, and it can't look like a social network because people will misunderstand what it is, and there are plenty of social media networks out there. And one big difference is that we're not looking for a half billion members. The membership must be exclusive. If you adulterate your cluster, it ceases to be a cluster. We want members to be able to interact easily with like members who are the competitive advantages which I outlined are there and not to have a lot of irrelevant business or conversations point on. The goal of all of this is to assemble an array of services which is large enough and cluster critical mass for members to find what they need so they can share, find the services they need, combine the services, and we can attract outside customers, regional, local and outside customers as users of our cluster services. So this is what we did. We created a intelligence services cluster portal. I'll just take you through its structure quickly. We haven't about the ISC. I'm sure you will agree from the sort of the complexity of the understanding of why this might work. They have to be very carefully and lucidly explained to potential members why they wouldn't want to use this thing. And we know from our experience that some people get it instantly and some don't. So this is something if you're working, building business tools for sectors that they really need to understand how they work and they need to participate in building the tools back to that later. Membership, there's registration. Memberships are vetted. But anyone can go anywhere in the portal except to the forums. We want to keep the conversations amongst the businesses that have the... who are the right type to be members. So what we're trying to do is create an exclusive community that can take it... that can work together competitively while still enabling non-members to enter this domain and purchase services. We launched the portal in January and we've been testing it and talking to its members about its value and its function. And we've just received additional funding and have begun structural upgrades which we know will improve it. So we may have... do encourage you to go and visit the portal. I'll give you... you'll see the URL for it at the end of the presentation. But in a few weeks, it's going to be even better. And one of the nice things is we have members with technological expertise coming forward and saying, you know, this is important. This has been viable. We're going to help you make this better. And that's so critical. Anytime you create something for a target sector and they don't take hold of it and adopt it, then it's not going to work. So we're very pleased that the members is wanting to assist us in making this work. So why would we do this? What are the economic benefits of this? First is the retention of dollars. Numbers of the cluster are now, we hope, using local services rather than purchasing them off coast. So we're always downright. Likewise, our local consumers now have ready access to these types of services. We're bringing new dollars because if our businesses are able to go out and get work that they might not have been able to before by combining their services, that increases their revenues and when we begin to market this cluster broadly as a convenient place to find professional technological services, we expect their revenues to increase. And the third part of this gets right back to this whole ABRD trend and phenomena. Sunshine Coast along with so many other communities in British Columbia is advertising itself. Come live here because of our wonderful natural amenities and our quality of life. Well, we're going to add to that. Bring your business here because we can get you on the competitive ground running. So we're giving a business advantage that is to the natural amenities to give people the reasons to come here. What are our results? So far we've had 87 businesses join our express interest and 30 of them were vetted out. We're pretty happy with that. The real difficulty we find here and I think you'll find in rural areas in general is that this is a diffuse group of businesses. I call this question the wood because if you drive the back roads of the Sunshine Coast, beautiful screens and trees, you know, there's homes back there with enterprises in it. So we've had difficulty getting the word out. Following our upgrades, we are going to initiate another program. Interesting thinking about doing this sort of thing. What helps the most is a story in the newspaper. We've got 40 members in three days. What's very encouraging are the dozens of glowing accolades from the members. This is what's needed. It's about time. This is going to work. It's not working perfectly yet, but that's the way things all start and we're quite certain we're going to make it function very well in the publicity campaign coming. What are our economic goals? What are the measurable things we want out of this? We want to grow the cluster to a minimum of 100 members. I'm going to stop there, but we feel that's the minimum critical mass, have the array of services to make it useful for the members and to attract outside purchaser of those. We want to know how many members have used each other's services rather than external services. We can measure how many dollars we've kept. We want to measure how many members have been able to take on assignments that it could not have without partners. That brings in new dollars. We want to track the number of new businesses attracted by the opportunity to join this question. Of course, we'd be able to do that by looking at membership. And we want to track sales generated via the portal once we begin to market it as a convenient place. What I've been presenting here is one example of applying economic development innovation to new sectors. It's only one. Some of the other things that we're planning on doing and I think an interesting discussion would be what are some of the other economic development applications or innovations that we could use? What else are we doing? We'll be advocating for broader bandwidth. This is a critical course for this sector and maybe by adding a couple of hundred member businesses to that. This sort of thing, an office for business innovation, it's an idea that's a balance. On the Sunshine Coast, there are a number of sectors that are interested in this sort of thing. And we believe that we can bring the fiber optic nodes because we're not going to have last mile. Two central locations that we'll be able to create a sort of a draw and a revenue earning draw that would be valuable for the members of this sector and other sectors. And we're going to be asking our ISP members what else could they use? Do they need a, it's many of them are home based. Do they need to place a client to meet each other? Do they need sophisticated software or hardware that they don't normally have in their office? This is the sort of thing which increases the competitiveness of these sectors if you can provide it. We need to look perhaps at bylaws. And our rural, current rural bylaws are based on people living in the country and working in town. If homes are increasing in a place of business then we may have to change some bylaws if they are prohibiting commerce in the country. This, well we don't really want to suggest this. As you probably know, rural areas are generally not subject to business businesses. But there's an argument that perhaps they should be because those dollars are often used for economic development and are also the type that's on here. However, the other side of that is that once we start, you know, people come out of the woods and we start slapping 100 feet or license fee on them and we're also sort of out of them and I'm not sure if they're compliant with bylaws they just hide them, just drive them away. So we're not likely to do that. But it's worth considering. We want to measure and monitor the economics of the cluster. Because we have membership, we can find out the size of the businesses, how many employees, revenues, where they do business, calculate multipliers. So we can have pretty good information on this emerging sector. What other types, what other sectors are amenable to cluster development? Well, there's a lot of talk about a green cluster network here in the Czechoslovakia. It's a good candidate for a cluster. This approved transportation links really has nothing to do with the ISC. The reason why it's there is the studies I talked about before show that proximity to a major city and an international airport, even within an hour, is one of the key factors in relocations by these groups. But we need to look at that too. And we have a youth attraction organization run by young people and they have highlighted the Solgentservice cluster as something that young entrepreneurs will use. It's going to be a factor, we believe, in attracting and gaining youth. And so in summary, there are new forms of commerce, urging rural areas. And the base attraction here, Catholic, is the natural lifestyle that has been found in prosperity. I believe that we've only begun to look at what economic development practices can be, how we can shape and meet the goals of economic development, which are to be expected in attracting businesses. We also need to talk about the other side, the direct and the indirect, the indirect benefits, because there are considerable synergies in them, as Nicole's pointed out. Do all of this, and it adds up to a methodology for next economic diversification. And I had a matter of fact just say thank you and it has the highest portal is www.PostISP.net PostISP.net And now I'd like to hand things back to Darby to moderate the question and answer. Hi, Michael. Thanks very much. Thank you, Nicole, as well, for folks from the very valuable, valuable presentation there. I'd like to draw everyone's attention back to the feedback button for the discussion portion of our webinar today. So as I outlined at the outset of our presentation today, if you do hear the question now, and we're very enthusiastic to have your questions, and I can see we've already got a couple queued up, if you could please hit that scroll down menu with the feedback button on the top right-hand side of your screen, and just change the indicator from what is green and just proceed to purple, which is question, and we will just address the questions at the queue up. To actually ask your question, what you'll need to do is hit, once I call your name, just hit star seven to unmute your line and address the question to the individual you wish to speak to. So to begin, Megan, Megan McIvac, I can see you're there first in queue. If you could please hit star seven and then ask your question. Hi. Hi, Megan, we can hear you. Oh, great. The first figure was it, sorry, her name, Nicole? Yeah. Nicole. Yeah, I'm calling from Rebel Stokes, B.C. We're very near Golden. I'm not sure if you know us at all. I'm fairly new to the town myself. I'm living here now. I've been here for almost two years. I'm working with the city of Rebel Stokes with the Department of Parks, Recreation, and Culture. And my background is in social change and development. But my concern for this town is it's an awesome town. It's great. But we have a huge mountain development going on called Rebel Stokes Mountain Resort. And it is bringing a lot of tourism based to this town for skiing and a lot of ski touring and snowmobiling and such and so forth. One of my major concerns and what I'm wondering is to how to maintain this small town field is a lot of concern of people in the community. It has a lot of young families, talented people, but housing prices are going up. Local business taxes are going up and such and so forth. I'm not sure if it's directly related to the resort or not. But I was just wondering what kind of steps do small communities take so that they don't become developed in the wrong kind of ways, that they maintain that community? Great. Thank you for your question. Megan, can you hear me okay? Yes, I can. Yeah, thank you very much. And, yes, very familiar with Rebel Stoke. And your concerns are good ones. I think people are often, I go back to my comments about the approach for tourism. If it's seen as solely an economic reason to pursue something, we can run into problems when it's not integrated. I know we have somebody here from Yuclula. Is it Patricia on the call too? There are examples out there. I would definitely look to your neighbor, Golden, and what they did. It's a very similar kind of experience as a resort coming in. And luckily, Golden had a planner. Very good ones. I still does. But at that point, I was familiar with engaging the residents to find out what they value. What they value about that town. Unless we have numbers and unless we really know what people value, we often walk around making assumptions about who values what. And those can be very dangerous as you sort of move forward. So I would say initially you have to get a feel with broad community engagement. Whether you've got a recent plan for the community that has actually done that, that would be a first start because that's where you get at those values that I was talking about. And the reason I brought up Yuclula is because they've had great track record here with planning as well. Saying we know what people value. And instead of just inviting, being open to all investment and inviting that, your residents and if you're using a balanced approach, you need to kind of consider which of those do you want to invite in and which don't you. And it's not that you're being non-business friendly if you decide not to. It's just that you're being conscious about the long-term attractiveness for these various audiences over time, if that makes any sense. So I would say step to take is definitely finding out those values, who has what values. In terms of housing, tax increases, those are by-products, yes, of often unfan growth and people letting the economic sort of priorities take over. So the one thing about being in your region is that you do have a number of other communities around that are doing some very innovative stuff in affordable housing that I would reach out to as well. And I know the Columbia Trust folks could probably line you up with some of those folks as well. I hope that's great. So you're an amenity migrant. Yes, I have. Thank you. Very much, Megan. And thanks, Nicole. Megan, if I could just ask you to change your indicator back to proceed. And I see we have George Penfold next. George, if you could please get to our seven and ask your question. Thanks, Debbie. Michael and Nicole, great presentation. In the tenor of your presentation, you both sort of talked about amenity-based migration and development as if it... And I'm left with the impression that it's perceived as sort of an add-on to what's already in place. In our region, and I don't think it's a lot different throughout WorldBC, we have about 5% population change over every year. And a large part of that changeover is related to the normal economy that runs here, retirement, trying to attract people to the region to replace workers who are retiring and so on. What role does amenity play in just keeping the economy that's there rolling? And the second question is, again, a lot... You both talked about sort of the business aspect, but in the work we've done here, about 20 to 25% of the folks who moved to this region or who have moved in the last five years have moved for retirement. Could you talk a little bit about the role of retirement in this whole picture of amenity migration and what some of the economic upsides and downsides of that might be? Nicole, do you want to go first on that? Okay, to unmute there, thanks, George, for that. Michael, are you on the line? Yes, I am. Okay, how do you want to proceed? Why don't you respond first, and I'll see if there's anything left for me to add. Okay, yeah, George talked about sort of as an add-on what role does it play in keeping the existing economy going. In the three regions that we've been looking at, currently Georgia, across the country, which is King's County, Nova Scotia, the Charles Blas region of Quebec, and the East Kidney to Columbia Valley area there. What we have found that is particularly in some of those regions that AVRD is, yes, it's folding over existing industries in many ways. It has a nice sort of complementary... It's not sort of about one sector edging out another sector, and so in the sense of your question about what role does it play in keeping the economy going, it really is largely, you know, if you're thinking about attracting people there for that workforce, as you talked about, if it's an attractive area to live and to settle and people know about it, then that would be one of the obvious ones that I can think of. And I'm comparing this to some other rural regions of Canada where the pursuit of some industries, which have resulted in a large transient population coming in. I'm thinking some of the areas, for example, in Northeast DC with high concentrations of transition employees, the areas haven't necessarily focused on the attractiveness of place, sense of place and attractiveness. And so, you know, some people comment about the vulnerability that they have. It's if the resource and if the reason for being there is only about industry, and if that industry does go south, then there's nothing much to attract those. In many cases, often have a negative image of the people that have been there in the past. So in long answer to your question, I would say that the role that plays with the existing economy is that it often compliments existing economies quite well. And I'll maybe let Michael speak to the comment on the retirement. Thank you, Nicole. I'd like to add something to what you said about the impact on the existing economy. In our study in the South Okanagan-Sanokimene valleys, we found no difference in the value placed on the quality of amenities between lifelong residents and amenity migrants. The reasons for staying there included the value that they placed on natural amenities and the cultural amenities. So, George, I don't know if this answers your question. They worked not just to attract but to keep. When we asked people what would cause you to leave, just as many lifetime residents indicated that if there was a deterioration of the landscapes, they would leave. I'm not quite sure how to answer the retirement part of it. I mean, it's a phenomenon. It's well-tracked. We have a senior's population with the means to make decisions about where they want to live, and now we have a second generation. That's my generation, which also has the means to do that. I think you know as an economist on Georgia that there are positive things about having a retirement community. I think that the value, the economic value, I don't just speak in economic terms, but that's kind of where we're going today. The economic value of a senior's population is higher than most people think, but obviously the balanced demographics is what you want. So, I think some of the comments that I made shows that young people are the ones who are... More senior people may come to retire, but the people who can take advantage of the enablers are younger people. Yeah, and that makes sense in terms of the welcoming communities work that we've done here is there are different priorities between age groups and between visible minorities, for example, and the rest of the community, and we need to do some more confusing of that. And I do have some concern about... because I asked the question around the general economy about distinguishing and many reintegration from the phenomenon of what goes on in a region and the importance of it. The other thing is, and you mentioned that Michael, the connectivity in the work that we did, we also asked why people might be thinking about leaving in parallel to the reasons they moved around in many, immediately next three important things had to do with health services, personal safety, affordable housing, and communications infrastructure. And on the why people leave, it has a lot to do with a lack of those services and the lack of employment opportunities that we haven't tracked it well. We've certainly heard anecdotally about people who have moved because of the amenity and able to connect that either to a home-based business or a job, but then not being able... they've found they haven't been able to get adequate employment for the partner and have had to leave again. So we need to also, I think, look a little more carefully at the dynamic of people leaving to get a better understanding of how we actually build a context to make amenity migration very successful. I agree with you, George. Great. Thank you. This is Leslie Lacks speaking. Victoria Parrot has a problem with their phone, so I'll just continue facilitation for the moment. I didn't see who was first, either Terri McCartan or Jeff Garbert. But Terri, did you want to go and ask a question? Hit star seven to unmute. Hello. Terri here. Hi. Thanks. We can hear you. Yeah. I had two questions. One presentation said how important it was to be within one hour of transportation from a major population center, and the other example was very important to have excellent access to broadband, and that's very spotty as soon as you get outside while basically Southern DC. Those are my questions. Okay, Nicole, I'll respond to that first and then you can add if you like. Let me just contextualize the importance of having a major city within an hour and having an airport. That will just be a forming factor in the type of people, and to some extent the rate. How many migration is occurring at a pace, at long distances away? So I don't think we need to overemphasize that. It just turns out in this study, this research is from the Northwestern United States that of the systems amenities that Nicole mentioned, it winds up being near the top in just about every study. The broadband issue, and that's it. I think that's how the world runs now through the Internet, at least a large part of it. And as long as rural areas are behind and it's hard to keep pace, they will be at some disadvantages, but my experience looking around is that the disadvantages is not crippling. Hi, Sherry, and thanks, Michael. Yes, I mean, some of the areas that we've looked at, and that question the federal government's asking is, it's a suitable approach for some rural areas of Canada more than others. I don't know that we can really answer that yet. The one hour, it's probably easier for some areas in the one hour because the places that we've seen the highest growth across Canada over the last census period is the periphery within that sort of hour, we call them metro adjacent zones across Canada. But there's lots of regions that are much more remote that are experiencing that. So for example, the East Kootenays isn't within that sort of timeframe, and yet they've had some of the most explosive growth in the country when it comes to people being attracted to the area. So I don't know that that's necessary, you know, system drivers enabling that as a big piece, but I would say it largely depends too on who you're trying to attract. You know, there's some regions of the country that they've used their isolation and remoteness, for example, as a strength to say, you know, this is what we have here, and that's suitable to attract certain types of people. So I don't think that that necessarily counts those regions out. It maybe makes it more complex to attract the kind of people that require high speed on an everyday basis, you know, to run their business in Calgary or Vancouver. But I think we need to think outside of those boundaries or limitations to say what do we have and who is that attracted to. Does that help, Cole? Yes, it does. Thank you. Yeah, I'd just like to add to that. I agree with everything Nicole said. This is perhaps the place to distinguish between permanent amenity migration and seasonal or temporary amenity migration. Many areas that are experiencing large volumes of people moving there, a lot of them are secondary, are second homes for people. The business, the things related to airports, approximately towns, and wireless are much more important for the people who want to set up the enterprises. But I do want to underscore what Nicole said. Go with your strength, because after all, it's that natural and cultural capital which is, that's the capital for this, and the rest of them are just assets that will shape the types of people and the types of enterprises that are able to move there. Great. Thank you very much. Terry, if you have no more questions, could you change your indicator back to green? Jeff, Jeff Gobbett. Thank you. I have a couple of questions. We're calling from the Colmox Valley. We just recently adopted March 29th. So yesterday, I guess, or the day before yesterday, a new regional growth strategy for our newly incorporated region. And some of the things that we've had a challenge with, and this is, and I'm trying to be obtuse, but the word rural has, it's probably one of the least understood terms, but most widely used. And I just, it'd be interesting to hear when we talk rural, is it, is it as complex as I really think it is? That's one question. Maybe the speakers could maybe address that. But the one thing that, from a question, from an amenity-based rural development perspective, just trying to get an understanding with sort of the challenges of correlating community planning work that's been done and the public, the overall public cost of these developments, infrastructure, all these kind of things. Because often amenity-based rural development, if we're talking about unsettled areas that come with the range of commercial tourism and residential development, they are often very challenging on the softer side of cost, the provision of peak water and sewer infrastructure for seasonal development, public transportation, those kind of things. They have, in the past, at least a tendency sometimes to draw away from the small-scale incorporated area. So it's just interesting just to hear some comments. How to balance rural amenity-based development with the public costs of development and the community planning that goes on when you have existing areas that want to be supported to that. Just sort of looking for a general discussion around that if that's possible. Michael, I'll start here if you don't mind. Please do. Thank you, Jeff, for the question and congratulations on your new regional growth strategy. Yeah, the question of rural. We all debated that to no end. There's various ways to look at that. I'm starting to lean towards, for example, I just spent a few weeks in King's County, Nova Scotia, and I don't know how many people are familiar with that area, but I at one time lived on a big ranch in Northern Alberta. So rural to me was 10 miles away from a community of 150. So, you know, rural is relative, isn't it? And now I live in Cedar Yellow Point area south of Minimal on five acres, and that is, you know, people would argue that's really advocating that's rural. King's County, Nova Scotia was community after community, and yet if you ask those people, I would say, this isn't really rural, is it? And they absolutely feel that it's rural. I'm starting to define it by how people value. How people value that sense of place, and is it rural to them? You know, is it up to academics and folks in policy to define what rural is, or is it really up to people to define what rural is for them? And I think, again, that's going to be based on their values. The second part of your question is, yes, it's a real challenge, the challenges in correlating planning. And when I talked about planning earlier in the presentation, one of my questions, too, is that most rural areas don't have planners, and the planners, maybe they have one planner for a community or a region, and they spend most of their time on permitting. But they don't often have the resources, or see the need to put resources into this type of planning. So that's where, and that would be a question that I didn't mention earlier. I'm going to bring back to King's County one more time, because when it comes to balancing the costs, the public costs that go into this, I think that that's one of the... King's County is very much using an ABRD strategy, and when I talk about the importance of working with regional partners in rural areas, some of those costs, if regions share their amenities and if regions share their value over those amenities and are sharing some strategies in terms of how to maximize the use of those amenities, they also can share the costs associated to the priority system amenities that go into making this happen. King's County's been extremely successful at that in their rural areas, you know, putting in public transit between multiple communities, broadband, all of that sort of stuff with a variety of regional partners. So that would be one way to offset it, because there's no way that every community can do this on their own. So those would be some of my thoughts, Jeff. Jeff, I'd just like to answer that in a slightly different way. After all, communities the size of Courtney and Comox, we could even say Vancouver, will market themselves based on their amenities. Vancouver is associated with wonderful natural amenities, and so is your region. But I think from the standpoint of economic development, little has changed in your, the economy of say a small city or a large city by the fact that people are coming there because of natural and cultural amenities. But their relocation to rural areas is something new and offers new opportunities. It's been an interesting question for those of you who come from small cities or big cities or areas around large cities. What have you found relevant about our two presentations today that you could take back to your planning department and to your economic development strategies and to your official community plans? If I may, I'd like to share your definition of rural. It's really what people think is rural. And I think it's been a real challenge for us to balance some of the issues. I do think it's interesting from our region, it's coming down to sharing those costs. And it's funny, they didn't teach me in planning school that taxes and zoning matters. It's quite interesting that there is a tendency to think regionally and regionally benefiting from things but it's starting to develop at least in sort of, I don't know if we're rural BC or not on Central Bank of Ireland, that there's this real focus on the public costs of things or just at their absolute maximum. Anyway, it doesn't sound very visionary to think about taxes. I do think what's really interesting what you're talking about is that economic development strategies really need to be focused on the benefits that they really need to be focused on our strategic advantages which also seems to make sense but I'm not sure all of economic development strategies are like that and we will certainly provide feedback from the two presenters that your strengths are what you really need to lead with. One thing that's interesting in our region recently have adopted a regional sustainability strategy that focuses on rural sustainability and our local economic development society is to incorporate that sustainability strategy in their strategic plan. So I think that's a real opportunity and really important but thank you very much. Great, thank you for the question and for the responses. Jeff, if you're finished with your question can you please change your feedback indicated to green? Danny Koss, and it looks like you have a question. Star 7 to unmute. Oh, that might mean that... Hello, Danny here. Oh, great, hi. I just wanted to ask about a amenity-based rural development limited... Is it limited by existing transportation hurdles like ferries, long travel times from urban areas? I just noted that many of the participants are from Vancouver Island, Sunshine Coast, Kootenays and Revelstoke and I'm not certain that everybody's in this boat but our long travel times via road or airport to scheduled airlines and ferries. Do they limit the abilities of amenity-based rural development? Well, if I may begin with that, I would go back to something Nicole said earlier that it depends on who you're talking to. Some people exactly want to go to places that are further away which are really rural. No one would argue that they're rural. Here on the Sunshine Coast, we consider the ferry to be in all matters of blessing and a curse. We have the small town, rural feel to this place because you can't get here by road but it's also a real challenge to development and growth. So, and again, the literature on this will show that depending on that constellation of factors, how they set up, you will get different types of people coming to your area. And if you're interested in amenity migration as an economic developer from an economic development or economy-building standpoint, then there really are things that need to be in place which you can put in place. I don't think we have time to talk about them here but I think that perhaps during my presentation some of them might have been at least suggested. That's my response to that. Thanks. I was just wondering, it's just that some of this is preceded by tourism. So, tourism is limited to some extent by how far people want to travel. That's why I was asking, but thank you. I don't know if mine's muted or not muted here. Can you hear me okay, Danny? Yes, I can. Okay, good. So, it does transportation limit. You know, Michael and I had these conversations prior to the presentation as well because where people, that's why you say natural and cultural are drivers and system amenities enable, but they also can disable. So, to answer your question, I think that there's significant influence from transportation. Again, depending on the audience. People don't move because you have transportation access, but they may not move because of it. So, or they may move away. We've found in King's County, for example, that folks may move, you know, within an hour and a half of the Halifax area, they may move, but they last for two or three years, and then they move back. And the reason that they leave is because of the lack of system amenities. And so, they wanted that rural lifestyle, et cetera, et cetera, but then they moved away because of it. And so, transportation, I have seen in the region, and I would say it's not just tourism-related. I have actually seen very successful examples of some businesses that are isolated and remote, certainly in DC, that pool their resources together to bring people in over very long haul. Travelers, you know, tourists expect to travel. So, they're a little bit less sensitive about distance, costs, and time, et cetera, because it's part of the experience. But residents are a little bit more sensitive to that over time. So, depending on the audience and the fit of your amenities, you know, it definitely has to be something that would require that regional collaboration to provide that over time. Thank you. That's a nice broad response that I think I kind of get along with. Okay. Great. Thanks very much again for those questions and responses. Are there any other immediate questions? I think what I might do is hand this back to Gaby. I'm cognizant of Michael's question and I think it's an important one. I think folks might also want to reflect on sort of how the information today does impact their work in rural communities. And, Gaby, maybe something that you could look at is, is there an option for a blog or some kind of interactive feedback on the webinars that folks can, after reflecting on the information, be able to continue the conversation. But thank you very much for your questions and answers and I'll hand back to Gaby at this time. If I may, this is Michael. The question that I raised wasn't not just for the rural people, it was to ask people in smaller cities or adjacent to cities whether or not natural and cultural amenities can be seen as factors in reaching the goals of those communities as well. So, it's Carrie Prigmore on the line. Thanks, Leslie, for speaking and facilitating the questions. We've had a little bit of a technical challenge in Victoria but we'll still be on the line. So, I just wanted to close and put up the context here on the screen for any follow-up that you have, both Nicole and Michael's contact information is here and you should be able to see that on your slide as well as some resources that are available within the presentation. So, thanks also for the suggestion about the blog and some ways to engage in some interactive feedback. We'll look into that and see what we can come up with. A sincere thank you to all the participants that have joined us today. We hope this has been informative to you. We really encourage you to provide us with some feedback through the survey that will come out in the next couple of days as well as suggestions for other webinars that you would like to see. A sincere thank you also to Michael and Nicole for your time and for all the energy that you've put into making today possible. We really appreciate it and the series would not be possible without you. So, thank you. At the most of any final questions from anybody, we'll sign off and say thank you very much. I'm hearing none. I think we're good to say goodbye. All right, thank you.