Conversations Live with Stuart McNish

More than 150 court victories have confirmed that the resources of Canada can only be developed when working with and obtaining First Nations approval.

Many First Nations are on a road to reclaiming prosperity and revitalizing cultures.

Some urban First Nations have become significant land-owners actively pursuing development with the potential to help address our housing crisis. In rural areas some First Nations have taken ownership stakes in resource projects. Numerous companies are playing an active and positive role in reconciliation.

These early days – far from smooth and uncontroversial. It is likely impossible to envision where we will be in the decades to come. The interests of First Nations are enormously diverse, and often at odds – witness examples in salmon farming and forestry.

BC conducted a homeless count in October – indigenous people made up a third of those counted. Incarceration rates of indigenous people are more than 10 times those of the total population. Poverty and unemployment rates remain astronomically high. First Nations communities too often remain without the services that others take for granted.

The issues are not unique to BC, or even Canada – in an October referendum Australians voted against creating an advocacy committee to advise parliament on policies affecting Indigenous people.

Join us by webcast 7 p.m. November 21 as we bring together a panel of leaders in First Nations, business, and law to discuss economic reconciliation today, and into the future.

The panel:

• Ellis Ross – MLA (Skeena), Shadow Minister for Energy and LNG
• Crystal Smith – Elected Chief Councillor of Haisla Nation; Chairwoman of the First Nations LNG Alliance
• Conrad Browne – President & CEO, Dakwakada Capital Investments
• Greg D’Avignon – Former President & CEO of the BC Business Council of BC; Partner, Canadian Strategy Group
• Roger Dall'Antonia – President and CEO of Fortis BC
• Thomas Isaac – Aboriginal Law Lawyer, Partner at Cassels Brock & Blackwell LLP
• Leon Gaber – Executive Director & National Lead (Critical Infrastructure Resilience & Emergency Management Practice), KPMG

We hope you can join us!

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We launch our second season with a deep dive into the new world of artificial intelligence with some of Canada’s top thinkers in the field. 7 p.m. Oct 3, Stuart McNish will moderate a panel including:

• Edoardo De Martin – CEO Industrio AI & Chief Development Officer, Digital Innovation Cluster
• Mark Low – KPMG Ignition
• Terri Griffith – Keith Beedie Chair in Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Simon Fraser University Beedie School of Business
• Dr. Sylvain Moreno – Founder of the Circle Innovation model
• David Seymour – Vice President and General Manager in Office Media Group, Microsoft Vancouver,
• Calvin Gerus – Borealis AI

Early AI actually started playing an important role in our lives in the 1980s (even earlier in science fiction) - a computer science used for simple but detailed tasks such as inspecting circuit boards in manufacturing. Early AI proved good at picking patterns out of huge quantities of data and noting details a human eye may miss. It’s critical in the algorithms driving online search engines like Google, and in detecting credit card fraud.

With the launch of ChatGPT, however, the technology has been thrust into public discourse in a new way. Overnight, the new platform was writing blogs, conducting online research, and helping students cheat on papers. Its limitations have quickly become apparent, as have some of the new challenges the technology creates.

Perhaps more importantly, but quietly, new AI applications are being developed across hundreds of fields. AI’s already starting to play a key role in healthcare, education, and manufacturing. It’s creating new fields of work not conceived of until recently but already employing thousands.

It’s also fostering fears of increasing automation costing jobs – playing a key role in the recent port strike and ongoing Hollywood actors and writers strike. There is concern people will stop learning underlying processes AI can replicate and we’ll lose expertise in creating art by hand, writing, and research.

If AI does free humans from tedious and dangerous work but creates new jobs managing that work, is it a net positive? Will it finally be the technology that frees up our time for other things?

Can AI help us overcome looming challenges of capacity in fields such as healthcare and education?

AI is already starting to play a role in healthcare, helping doctors diagnose ailments from an array of scans, patient history, genetics, test results, and devices such as a fitness band or heart monitors. It has the same potential to radically change our financial systems, education, militaries, transportation networks, and media.

We hope you can join us as we strive to answer some of these questions on Oct 3.

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On Oct 10 we will be joined by an outstanding panel of people actively engaged in fostering workplace accessibility from a variety of perspectives – not just as it relates to disability, but

difference and diversity of all types.

The panel:

• Stephanie Cadieux - Canada’s first Chief Accessibility Officer
• Charlotte-Anne Malischewski - Human Rights Commission interim Chief Commissioner
• Mark Wafer - Disability rights activist and keynote speaker
• Wendy Lisogar-Cocchia - Pacific Autism Network founder & director
• Kathleen Reid - Switchboard PR founder & Chief Communications Officer
• Jillian Frank - KPMG partner, employment & labour law
• Parm Hari - Vancouver Fraser Port Authority Vice-President, People, Process & Performance

The statistics tell a powerful story. 16 per cent of Canada’s adult population has a disability. According to Statistics Canada’s 2022 survey only 59.4 per cent of Canadian adults with a

disability have employment, compared to more than 80 per cent of Canadians without a disability.

Yet, hiring a diverse workforce has proven benefits, across numerous studies – increased profits, a variety of perspectives leading to better decision-making, more innovation and creativity, reduced turnover and better engagement, and a broader pool of candidates from which to hire.

Mark Wafer and his wife Valerie’s story proves the point. They owned seven Tim Hortons’ franchises in the Toronto area. Hearing impaired himself, Mark was interested in creating jobs for people with disabilities. One of his first hires was a young man with Down Syndrome. He became a star employee – dedicated, hard-working, and friendly. Mark and Valerie went on to hire more than 250 people with disabilities during 25 years in that business – averaging about 17 per cent of their workforce at any one time, in roles from managers to bakers. They hired people with autism, hearing impairments, physical disabilities, and intellectual delays.

Fast food restaurants are infamous for high (and costly) employee turnover. What Mark found, however, was that while the average tenure for their employees overall was 1.3 years that grew to 7.0 years for employees with disabilities. The employees were dedicated, didn’t miss shifts, and worked hard.

In a CBC story, Mark estimated it costs him $4,000 to hire and train a new employee. With their longer tenures and strong work, hiring Canadians with disabilities improved their business performance and increased profit, while creating opportunity for dozens of people. Yet, unemployment rates among Canadians with disability remain stubbornly high even during times of labour shortage.

We hope you can join us for the conversation – webcast live 7 p.m. October 10.

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On May 16 we will sit down with an outstanding panel to explore an emerging high-tech industry with the potential to become one of BC’s most important economic sectors – life sciences.

BC has become a hub of life sciences innovation in recent years, with hundreds of companies leading the way in research into new therapies, pharmaceuticals, and biotechnology. According to Life Sciences BC the province is home to the country’s fastest-growing life sciences sector with 1,100 active companies employing 20,000 British Columbians and generating $5.4 billion in annual revenue.

Yet there are considerable impediments holding companies back from growing to larger scale in the province. BC’s corporate and income tax structure, limited industrial land needed to affordably build out office and processing facilities, and a challenging housing market all make it difficult to attract employees and scale up.

Our question – how can we create the conditions to ensure this sector’s success in BC?

Our panel:

• Andrew Booth, CFO - AbCellera
• Allen Eaves, President & CEO - Stemcell Technologies
• Brenda Bailey, BC Minister of Jobs, Economic Development and Innovation
• Darryl Knight, President - Providence Research
• Wendy Hurlburt, President and CEO - Life Sciences BC

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It is not news there are glaring cracks in our healthcare systems – in some cases reaching a breaking point. In both BC and AB numerous rural emergency departments have closed for hours, even days, due to shortages.

Healthcare organizations in both BC & Alberta struggle to recruit skilled doctors, nurses, care aids, and other skilled professionals. What can be done to alleviate the pressures on the system?

Alberta has made changes to primary care funding. This is widely seen as a positive step.

Yet funding for emergency physicians has not changed, nor has funding for hospitals.

Alberta Health Services has considered changing to an activity-based funding model over global budgets. In 2010, BC experimented with ABF and determined there were no changes in measures of quality. During the recent election in BC, the idea re-surfaced.

Families in both provinces struggle to find a GP – the foundation of our health care systems. Ontario has introduced new medical school rules that require students to be Canadians from Ontario.

Surgical waitlists are long, access to operating rooms rationed by difficult budgets, and the food is terrible.

The right of patients to use private clinics in their home province is not allowed.

Delivering healthcare in a province isn’t a simple thing. It requires coordination of thousands of patients, billions of dollars, thousands of specialist providers, complex equipment, and hundreds of facilities.

Just delivering healthy meals and timely appointments is challenging for institutions struggling to keep up with demand under budgets that are too tight - but already the single largest expenditure in every Canadian province.

Join us December 10 for a conversation on this critical matter with an outstanding panel.

We hope you can join us for the conversation.

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