The ‘warriors’ in Saskatoon’s business community

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Editor’s note: This is Part 2 in our contribution to Postmedia’s national series “How Canada Wins.” Over the next five weeks we’ll chronicle our community’s place in the country, the promise of greater prosperity, and the blueprint to get there. See the series intro here.

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“It’s not like they’ll just fight. They’ll fight to win. They will fight to survive, they will do whatever it takes.”

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That’s from Jason Aebig, CEO of the Greater Saskatoon Chamber of Commerce, while describing local business. He adds that if there’s even a glimmer of hope, businesses in the city will drive straight through.

Businesses in Saskatoon and much of Canada have been facing a string of “epic challenges”, according to Aebig, who pointed to COVID-19, supply chain issues, and more recently, tariffs.

“Even on the agriculture front, just last year we had a drought,” Aebig said.

“I don’t really recall a period in time where we spent so much time talking about businesses and their capacity to survive before.”

He said the business barometer at the start of the year had the theme: “From surviving to thriving.”

Businesses were optimistic about getting to a place where they could reinvest money and start hiring aggressively again, he said.

“For the last five years it has been a struggle to move from surviving, to thriving.”

Aebig said every quarter it feels like they are talking about some new thing that threatens the business community, but noted that some businesses are taking pride in their resiliency.

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“I think we’re extra special in that regard … the fact of the matter is that it has never been easy to do business in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. You are landlocked. You are, for the most part, in the middle of nowhere. You are sandwiched between larger cities and larger markets.”

There’s always a risk in Saskatoon of not being able to reach your customer, Aebig said, adding there will also always be an issue on the trade front that impacts raw commodities in the province.

“We’re battle tested.”

He said Saskatoon business owners are pragmatic problem solvers, saying regardless of the challenges, many industries have still found momentum and growth in the past few years.

The pace has changed for business, Aebig said, adding that business owners have to respond more quickly to challenges that are coming their way — faster than they ever have before.

“We used to talk about planning horizons in businesses five years out, 10 years out… I don’t think anybody talks in those terms anymore. It’s now not a matter of years, it’s a matter of months.”

When it comes to discussions around tariffs, Aebig called this a potential coming-of-age scenario for Canada. He said the things we’ve started to notice in the past couple months that Canadians find important, are things we should have been having discussions about six years ago.

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“We’ve been talking for decades about value added processing.”

He used mustard as an example, saying we grow mustard just to ship it somewhere else to put it in a bottle, and sell it back to us to put on our hotdogs.

He said people are just now starting to ask why we don’t process something like mustard ourselves.

Canada has other issues it needs to start considering, like internal trade barriers and regulatory changes, Aebig said.

“If you’re a trucker, you have to stop at the border in between Saskatchewan and Manitoba and change all the signs on the side of your truck before you proceed into that jurisdiction. We have seen how silly we have set ourselves up for decades, and only now have we gotten very serious about maybe trying to tackle them.”

He said it was time for Canada to get serious and grow up a little.

“We’ve got to work harder to make up for lost time, and make sure we do the things that we need to do here to be successful and sovereign.”

Aebig said Saskatchewan is the epicentre of small and medium-sized businesses in the country.

Small businesses, whether a brewery, coffee shop or consulting firm, are at ground zero of what economic development looks like, he said.

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“They generate the most economic activity. That’s why we always get very passionate and animated about them, because when they go dark, now there’s a whole other host of problems that come with that.”

He said when businesses go dark in neighbourhoods, you start to see problems revolving around safety, quality of life and affordability.

The biggest hurdle for small businesses has been access to capital, he said.

“Traditional lenders don’t like risk, and when they see small and medium sized businesses, that’s all they see.”

But he stressed that despite those challenges, resiliency will help push us through these problems, pointing to some of the businesses currently involved in Gather Local Market on the edge of Riversdale.

“These are very small enterprises,” he said. “These are one-to-five-people-big, tops. In spite of everything I’ve told you, all these people have decided to start a business in the last five years. That should say everything you need to know about how resilient and optimistic and forward looking we are.”

He pointed to local businesses sharing the building, like Sparrow Coffee and Better Brother Brewing, saying they came in at a difficult time and shouldn’t have succeeded, but tenacity helped them through.

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“It would be very easy to throw up your hands and say, ‘well damn it, the world’s coming apart and I guess this is over.’ But they’re just not built like that … They’re warriors.”

He said people starting businesses today have an unwavering sense of hope and confidence in their ideas, adding that is beneficial to everyone.

“The minute we see people throw up their hands and say ‘screw it, it’s not worth my time and effort and energy’, that’s when we all have to be very concerned.”

Saskatoon has the potential to lose ground if we don’t get very intentional and sharp about what we want to be, Aebig said.

He added that the world will not stand still, and other cities are more than happy to poach business and dangle incentives to take business away from us.

“Whether it’s trade, or tariffs, or taxes, everything rolls to the last link on the chain, and that’s you and me,” Aebig said, noting that costs can be passed down to those who don’t have that option.

He said this isn’t just a business community discussion, noting that everyone can understand that if we don’t get this right, we all carry that burden.

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He noted that we need to be intentional with our dollars and be more community minded, adding that a local business might be more expensive or have products that take longer to get.

“All these choices have consequences,” he said. “And maybe we also have to start living with the idea that we’re prepared to make some sacrifices on some of those things, if we know that the downstream impact will be more positive for us all.”

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