Provincial policy and local initiative : community economic development in Nanaimo
Date
1992
Authors
MacDonald, David Robert Bruce
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
Community Economic Development (CED) has been widely hailed as the most appropriate strategy for reviving local economies. It involves a new way of thinking, which avoids old controversies about public and private enterprise, and puts its emphasis on bottom-up community initiatives. It is designed to appeal to governments on both the right and the left -especially those that see themselves as representing people at the grass roots.
British Columbia has been governed for most of the last forty years by the Social Credit, a party with a strong rural, populist base and a commitment to small-scale private enterprise. Nonetheless, successive provincial governments have given scant support to Community Economic Development. This is despite the fact that the City of Nanaimo has been the site of one of the most successful CED efforts in the country. My purpose here is to explore this paradox, by examining provincial policy in relation to community economic development activities in the Nanaimo area. The thesis is that the province's failure to support CED initiatives in Nanaimo is due to a variety of political and bureaucratic resistances to the surrender of central authority.
To understand what is at stake, we must first put CED in perspective. The first chapter offers a review of traditional strategies for regional economic development, and shows how CED emerged as an alternative approach with some support from various governments, including the one in Ottawa. The second chapter provides a more detailed account of the evolution of relevant policy in B.C., and shows that the provincial government's approach to regional or community economic development has failed to incorporate the principles of CED despite some symbolic gestures in that direction in the late 1980s. The third chapter focuses on Nanaimo, where the province has created a major industrial park and supported municipal initiatives to attract outside investment. The doubtful benefits of these efforts are contrasted with the apparent success of the Nanaimo Community Employment Advisory Society (NCEAS) a CED initiative supported by the federal government but neglected by the province. In the fourth chapter, various explanations for the lack of CED program are examined: concerns over program overlap, cabinet infighting, ideological reservations, and concerns over local ability and accountability. While each of these explanations has its merits, it seems that a more comprehensive answer lies in the fact that elected and non-elected provincial officials view the devolution of power to non-governmental groups as a threat to either their chances of reelection or their agency's stature.
Description
Keywords
UN SDG 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth