From todays Herald.
Demolition workers hammer away on the fourth floor of the former Chronicle Herald building in downtown Halifax on Monday. The building is being taken down section by section and the site cleared to make way for a new world trade and convention centre that is still awaiting funding from the provincial government.
Conventional approach to business
ROD CAMERON may not be expecting it, but the convention centre expert from Vancouver is likely to become a focal point for an anti-P3 campaign in Halifax this week.
Cameron is set to deliver the ninth annual Carmichael lecture on Thursday at the World Trade and Convention Centre and is expected to present the case for conven tion centres as instruments for a broader economic devel opment strategy.
No matter how positive his message may be, however, it may be blurred a bit by a campaign launched by the Canadian Union of Public Employees to block all future public-private partnerships.
The union argues that the contracts to build P3 schools in Nova Scotia were flawed and therefore all such part nerships are suspect.
But it isn’t fair to prejudge all public-private projects, based on a bad experience in the past, without knowing the details of the agreement.
The new Nova Centre, pro posed by developer Rank Inc.
for the former Chronicle Herald
lands in downtown Halifax, will include a larger and more modern convention facility, if governments agree to help fund that part of the approxi mately $300-million complex.
Construction of the conven tion centre portion alone has been estimated to cost about $100 million.
Cameron is the president of a management and marketing consultancy called Criterion Communications Inc. , is exec utive director of Convention Centres of Canada and the international development director for the International Association of Congress Cen tres in Belgium.
Public-private partnerships bring in a wide range of choic es, he told me in a phone con versation Monday.
There are many different models for P3s, but Cameron said the most successful are those where project devel opment is separate from facil ity mana g ement.
“I’m saying that simply because the kinds of expertise required to do a good devel opment are not often found in the same place where you also find the expertise to be suc cessful marketers and oper ators for the final product."
Cameron said the conven tion business has become intensely competitive.
“A large part of the reason for that is the more enlight ened of governments have figured out that having a con vention centre isn’t simply all about filling up hotel rooms . . . the folks that are thinking it through now are realizing that a convention centre should be an integral part of an overall economic development strategy."
A convention centre can be used to suppor t broader aspi rations to become a hub for all kinds of activities — business, industrial, academic and profes sional — and that realization has encouraged many juris dictions to invest in convention centres, he said.
Therefore, any city that wants to remain competitive in the convention business needs to be prepared to invest.
“Because there is so much product available right now, if you fall behind, if you’re sub standard, you simply get by passed by the market."
More than anything, Cam eron said, communities need to g et their expectations straight in terms of what they want to get out of a convention centre.
“Having a centre means you have the opportunity to attract the type and to host the type of businesses that you want, but you still have to be very active, going out there and getting it and being able to compete effec tively in order to get it."
The expectations of conven tion planners, he said, have changed quite a bit and often a 20-year-old facility like the one in Halifax cannot adapt to con sumer demands.
“Redevelopment or construc tion of a new facility helps to make a community competitive again in a world where you’ve got to be competitive in order to survive."
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