Invigorated with a new sense of purpose, FedNor’s Team Northern Ontario trade export initiative is being revived after spending the last year in limbo.
An injection of $1,412,000 will be allocated to the program over the next two years.
“It’s a re-engineered program, restructured with what we think is a strong foundation through our community futures organizations,” says Carmen DeMarco, manager of program delivery, Northeast Ontario, FedNor.
Established in 2002 and disbanded in April of last year, the program originally saw trade advisors stationed within five different Northern Ontario chambers of commerce and economic development organizations.
However, the program is now being partnered with community futures development corporations (CFDC) due to FedNor’s concerns over the disparate mandates of the original host organizations.
“For example, chambers of commerce have all kinds of initiatives, and for them to give the kind of attention this initiative required, it was becoming a problem,” DeMarco says.
“Although they did a good job and the best job they could, we thought it would be better to go with organizations that partner closely with us.”
In both its former and current formats, Team Northern Ontario seeks to provide support to businesses to either prepare them for export or to expand their existing export services. The program has been pared down to two administrative centres, located in Thunder Bay and North Bay.
In the northwest, one senior trade advisor will work within the Northwest-Midwest Alliance (NMA), as managed by the Northwestern Ontario Development Network (NODN). In this role, George Kamstra will oversee the development of trade export services from Manitouwadge to Red Lake, and southwards into the United States.
Though help will be offered for other linkages, Kamstra says his mandate largely mirrors that of the NMA in helping to connect Ontario companies with American export opportunities.
“That could be on the stage of a market, it could be on the stage of a partnership arrangement for distribution of their product, it could be a number of things,” Kamstra says.
In the northeast, the program is hosted by the Venture Centre in Timmins and Economic Partners - Sudbury East/West Nipissing Inc., in Sturgeon Falls. Ken Passmore has been appointed to act as senior trade advisor, overseeing three additional trade advisors who will be stationed in Timmins, Sault Ste. Marie and North Bay.
Having previously served as the vice-president of General Motors’ export subsidiary in Canada and the United States, Passmore says this northeastern node will take a broader focus on export development.
“As far as we’re concerned, we can export to Barrie or we can export to China," Passmore says. "Obviously, 82 per cent of Canada’s exports go to the U.S., so we recognize the reality that they’re the obvious market, but that doesn’t preclude Europe or Asia, because any part of the world outside of northeastern Ontario is our oyster.”
