The Bruce Report

But ask a businessman in, say, India what he makes of such boasts and he’s more than likely to laugh appreciatively at your rich sense of humour, and politely remind you that this unpromising inlet is nothing more than a cartographic afterthought on the map of global shipping.

I say more than likely, because that’s exactly what happened not long ago to Karen Oldfield, the port’s president and CEO. “I was in India talking to people about what we do, and what we can offer,” she says, “when I was informed, in no uncertain terms, that Halifax simply doesn’t have a port. That’s when I realized that we had a serious marketing problem.”

In fact, over the past few months Oldfield and her board of directors have transformed themselves into something akin to luxury car salesmen (as in, what do I need to do to put you into this fully-loaded Ferrari of a port?), taking names and numbers, and giving no quarter to international competitors. They’ve hired a new business development manager to represent their interests in India, and contracted with Jeena & Company, a Mumbai-based freight-forwarder with more than a century of experience in global markets.

If all this sounds precipitous, it should. Despite its undeniably superior infrastructure, technology, management, and labour force, the Port of Halifax has been relatively late in recognizing the truth of the doorknocker’s credo that if you don’t make the calls, you can’t make the sales. In reality, international port marketing has become big business in recent years, thanks largely to the emergence of China, Southeast Asia and India as export powerhouses. The volumes of container traffic from these regions have been rising faster, on a percentage basis, than the gross domestic products of most G7 nations. The North American ports that have benefited – New York, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver – have done so because they have aggressively promoted their capabilities abroad.

Still, if Halifax is only now playing catch-up with the continent’s major players, it may soon enjoy a rare opportunity to beat them at their own game. Western ports, in particular, are rapidly becoming victims of their own success. Overburdened and underfunded, they are reaching the limits of their tonnage and handling capacities. Meanwhile, the construction trend in post-Panamax shipbuilding – that is, vessels too large and heavy to squeeze comfortably through the Panama Canal – favours a shift in trade through the Suez Canal, en route to places just like the Port of Halifax.

Of course, Karen Oldfield knows this like she knows her own name. She knows that her port’s annual container traffic stands at roughly half its potential capacity (currently about four million metric tonnes of cargo). She knows that Halifax could become a new haven for post-Panamax business. And she knows that the 460,000 tonnes-a-year of containerized goods passing through her watery gates from burgeoning Far East markets are mere drops in a bucket. Most importantly, perhaps, she understands the critical importance of the Port of Halifax as a nexus of regional economic development.

“Functioning at full capacity, we would bring new business into the Atlantic provinces and New England,” she says. “There would be enough traffic to generate demand for newer, more efficient transportation infrastructure linking the cross-border, Atlantica region of East Coast Canada and the U.S. northeast to the rest of the globe.”

Half-a-world away, Sachiem Singh, the Port of Halifax’s freshly minted Delhi-based business development manager, couldn’t agree more. “Atlantica is a big, big market for India, and the reverse is also true,” he says. “Look at Singapore or Hong Kong – they are nothing compared to Halifax. Their natural advantages and facilities can’t compete. But what they do have, what they’ve always had, is strategic marketing. What India doesn’t understand yet is that the most efficient gateway into North America in the coming years will be through the Suez Canal and through the Port of Halifax. It’s my job to send this message.”

Let’s hope that he does, and quickly, before a cartographic afterthought becomes nothing more than a footnote in the history of global shipping.

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