Prince Rupert’s new day dawning gains national attention

Last week’s opening of the new container terminal and gateway to Asia has garnered yet more attention from the National media. The Globe and Mail sent their Vancouver based features reporter Gary Mason on a northward trek, to learn more about the history of the project and the impact it is expected to have on life in the Northwest. His recollections of his visit were published in today’s Globe and Mail and is posted on line at the papers website.

Mason interviewed Prince Rupert Port Authority President Don Krusel and a number of local residents to try to get a better understanding of the importance of the project on the city’s economic landscape.

From the days of Charles Hays, through the collapse of the fishery and the closure of the pulp mill, he looked over the history of a city that at times seemed cursed. Mason interviewed Tony Briglio, who provided his interpretation of the current civic financial troubles, which included the admission that the city council of the day spent money from anticipated Skeena tax revenues, which will never be collected. It was a decision by that council that has left the city some twenty million dollars in the hole, a situation that they try to work their way out of to this day.

He proclaimed a new sense of optimism with the arrival of the port a sentiment shared by others interviewed for the piece. All who seem to believe that the port signals an important shift in the economy for Prince Rupert and a barometer for better days ahead.

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As part of his article he includes details on some of the projects that are planned for the city built on the interest over the container port development, though he seems a bit behind the curve on a few of the projects, the Safeway has long since been completed and we already enjoy that Vancouver staple the Starbucks store, but you get the drift of his listings, things have certainly changed from five years ago.

In fact, Mason suggests that while there are still doubters in town that the project will be the massive engine of growth that many say, he suggests you have to look rather hard to find them.

In the end though, while the article is an interesting thumbnail sketch of past and recent Prince Rupert history, it is mainly about the determination of Don Krusel to turn around a struggling port and make it a world gateway and contender for a share of the world wide container shipment business. Mason takes us from the early days of the polite but unsold audiences Mr. Krusel would have with world shipping officials, to Wednesdays sun filled grand opening and the thousands that it attracted to the Fairview docks. It makes for a pretty remarkable journey and as he says one that would probably make for an interesting book one day.

A telling quote comes at the end of the article when the Port President capsulized our past troubles as a case of being “blessed by geography and cursed by history”.

It will be interesting to watch as times move forward to see if this new day and new start banishes those past historical problems. One suspects that there are still many chapters left to write in that book of Prince Rupert, a city still in transition and looking forward to its future after going through the curses of the past.

CONTAINER PORTS: GATEWAY: A KEY TRADE ROUTE IS BORN
Shipping a new sense of optimism to Prince Rupert
Official opening of the Fairview Terminal brings calm in the wake of city's 'perfect economic storm'

Gary Mason

Globe and Mail
September 17, 2007

PRINCE RUPERT, B.C -- To tell this story properly you need to start at the beginning. And the beginning stretches back to the start of the last century when American entrepreneur Charles Melville Hays, a railroad builder, happened upon this rainy little place in the middle of nowhere and saw something others couldn't.

A gateway to the Far East.

Mr. Hays imagined a bustling city of 50,000 that would be the western terminus of the Grand Trunk Railway, of which he was president. He imagined a wealthy populace and fancy hotels.
"He wanted to get in on the silk trade between North America and Asia," says Don Krusel, president of the Prince Rupert Port Authority. "He had this great dream, this vision for Prince Rupert that was ahead of its time."

So what happened?

What happened was Mr. Hays went to England in the spring of 1912 to arrange for financing to complete the national railroad to Prince Rupert. By all accounts, his visit was a success. He got the money. There was only one problem: He booked a return trip home on the Titanic.

"When the ship went down, Charles Hays and his great plans for Prince Rupert went down with it," Mr. Krusel says. "Some believe the town has been cursed ever since."

But there is finally some light on the past's seemingly ever-dark horizon here.

There will certainly be many, for instance, who will take as a sign the remarkable day the city enjoyed last Wednesday, when politicians and business leaders from around the continent arrived here for the official opening of the Fairview Terminal.

Organizers of the event had hundreds of umbrellas at the ready to hand out to assembled guests. As it turns out, the crowd only needed them to shade themselves from the heat. The sun blazed all day, which is pretty remarkable given that Prince Rupert receives more rain than virtually any other city of size along Canada's West Coast. If you visit here it is often grey and misty in the morning and grey and misty in late afternoon. If you're lucky, the sun will come out for a while midday.

"It may have been the nicest day of the year," Mr. Krusel says of the opening. "We couldn't believe it."

In a sense, the usual weather has become a metaphor for the town itself. While there have been some bright spots over the years, there have been many more stretches of bleakness, economically at least. It was out of one of the town's more profound periods of hopelessness that was born the idea that spawned the current mood of optimism.

Folks refer to that particular stretch of comfortlessness around here as the "perfect economic storm."

It was about six years ago now. The commercial fishing industry, for so long the lifeblood of Prince Rupert, had officially been given up for dead. Then the town's major employer, the Skeena Cellulose pulp mill, finally went under after being propped up by various levels of government for a number of years. Suddenly, 750 townspeople were out of work. The coal industry was also in the dumps and shipments out of the Ridley port facility began drying up.

Things at the city's other port, Fairview Terminal, were not much better. Fairview, which had moved about 800,000 tonnes of forest products in the late 1980s, was gasping for breath as well. Company auditors looked Don Krusel in the eyes and gave it to him straight: The Port of Prince Rupert was on death's door. In 2005, the Fairview Terminal moved just 20,000 tonnes of product. You couldn't survive on that meagre amount of business.

The problem was really quite simple. Prince Rupert was a bulk port. In other words, it only had the ability to fill up the holds of ships with bulk product like grain or pulp. But the world of shipping had long ago moved to containerization. Containers are the big metal boxes that allow for the more efficient movement of goods. They also protect products better.

Virtually all the major ports along the West Coast of North America had invested hundreds of millions of dollars installing the cranes that were necessary to handle container traffic. Ports from San Diego to Vancouver had kept up with the times; Prince Rupert was still wearing bellbottoms and wide-collared shirts opened to the navel.

It was Don Krusel who came up with the bright idea to finally get with it. He was the one who believed that this tiny, perpetually mist-shrouded city on the west coast of little-known Kaien Island could become a major player on the international trade scene. You see, he could read the business section of The Globe and Mail as well as the next guy. He knew how insatiable North America's appetite for everything Chinese had become. And he also knew how crowded and congested container ports along the West Coast of North America had become as a result.
The continent needed more container port capacity. Urgently.

It would seem, then, that converting Prince Rupert to a container port from a bulk port would be a pretty simple proposition then, right?

"At first I was laughed out of boardrooms when I mentioned what I wanted to do," says Mr. Krusel, now able to laugh about it himself.

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The problem was, he needed nearly $200-million to make this thing work, and nobody believed you could have a major port facility next to a town as small as Prince Rupert. Major ports needed to be located next to major cities that would absorb the goods being unloaded from the ships, the thinking went. Mr. Krusel knew that wasn't the case; he knew there was enough demand elsewhere on the continent that would make the plan viable, especially given that Prince Rupert is at the end of an under-utilized rail line that had north and south and east and west links in the United States.

The various twists and turns that Mr. Krusel's journey took on the way to Wednesday's ribbon-cutting would make a book in itself. The bottom line is that he persevered and now people are calling the new trade route Prince Rupert represents between Asia and North America as important to Canada as the St. Lawrence Seaway.

Pretty heady stuff.

That's really only part of the story and not the best part, in my opinion. The best part is what this port, and its planned expansions down the road, have meant to this place. Given what Prince Rupert and its people have been through, you can't help but say to yourself: "Thank God. It's about time this town caught a break."

Tony Briglio is a city councillor. Other than the three years when he left to go to university, he's lived in Prince Rupert his entire life. He's worked at the local credit union for the past 34 years. During that time he's seen it all: He's seen seiners walk into the bank literally carrying bags full of money. And he's also sat across from teary-eyed mill-workers who were losing their homes.
Mr. Briglio became a councillor five years ago, just after the mill shut down, throwing hundreds of people out of work. It didn't take long for the new council to discover just how badly off the city's finances were.

"We were broke," Mr. Briglio says one day recently in his office. "And the reason we were broke is because we kept giving life to the mill by allowing it not to pay their taxes. Unfortunately, as a city we spent that money as if we were going to get that tax money eventually. Of course, we never did."

By some estimates, the city is anywhere from $15- to $20-million in the hole. But things are changing. You can feel it.

"There's a feeling of optimism we haven't felt around here for a long, long time," Mr. Briglio says. "People have a sense of pride again. They're fixing up their homes. There are real-estate developments going up and homes being sold for half a million dollars in Prince Rupert. It wasn't that long ago you could get a nice place for $100,000."

Some big-box players are said to be moving in, always a sign that they believe in a place.
"It's all because of the container port," Mr. Briglio says. "When those cranes came to town it was really something. It plugs us into something that's worldwide. We will no longer be slaves to the boom and bust cycles of the resource sector. That just wears a town out."

People in town are making transitions all over the place.

Todd Rhino came to Prince Rupert from Nova Scotia in 1965. For most of his life here, he worked on the fishing boats. Now he's becoming a longshoreman with the hope of finishing his working days moving goods at the Fairview Terminal.

"I think the hopes of a lot of people are riding on this," he says, while working on the dock one day last week.

Clayton Williams is a real-estate agent for ReMax. He's lived in Prince Rupert for 25 years and has owned a concrete company and also worked in the town's now-defunct sawmill. He became a real-estate agent last year, figuring he would take advantage of the town's resurgent economy.

"More than anything, I think the terminal and the jobs it's creating will bring stability," Mr. Williams says. "And stability creates optimism, which is good for the economy, which is good for my business."

Of course, you wouldn't expect everyone in a city of 15,000 to be wild about the new terminal.

There are those who don't believe it will be the great boon people are predicting. Then there are those who worry it will create so many jobs the population of Prince Rupert will triple and the region's unique feel will disappear forever. But honestly, you have to look hard to find these people.

Meantime, back at the offices of the Port of Prince Rupert, Don Krusel puts his hands behind his head and allows himself a look of quiet satisfaction. It was his dream, after all, that's created all this excitement. It was his idea to invite cruise ships to come calling and they have, in record numbers. People told him that idea was nuts, too.

Mr. Krusel, who came to Prince Rupert for "one or two years" 20 years ago, is tall and unassuming. He's an accountant and, well, looks like the clichéd ideal of an accountant - and by that, I mean he's not the flashiest dresser. His suits are, well, functional. He'll never do anything crazy with his hair. And he'll always wear a tie that isn't too flashy either. In other words, he'll never do anything, intentionally, to draw attention to himself. He seems a little uncomfortable with the recognition his latest coup has generated.

But he can also sound pretty proud too.

"I like to tell people that Prince Rupert has been preparing for this day for 100 years," Mr. Krusel says. "We are a city that has been blessed by geography and cursed by history.

"Hopefully, this terminal will once and for all put a sword in the curse of the ship that went down nearly 100 years ago and took Charles Hays's dream with it. The Titanic sunk that dream and now we've resurrected it."

Prince Rupert facts

Located on Kaien Island, approximately 770 kilometres north of Vancouver, Prince Rupert is linked to the B.C. mainland by a short bridge.

The city is the ancestral home of the Tsimshian First Nations.

It was incorporated on March 10, 1910.

In the early 1980s, it was considered the halibut capital of the world.

It is the deepest ice-free natural harbour in North America and the third deepest in the world.
Prince Rupert Airport is itself on an island, nearby Digby Island.

Employment picture

According to a recent report by the Prince Rupert Economic Development Corp., the opening of the Fairview Terminal was the catalyst behind unprecedented investment opportunities. They include:

PHASE I

Phase I of the Fairview Terminal will create 350 on-site jobs. In addition, Canada Customs is hiring 30 new employees and increasing its payroll in Prince Rupert from $500,000 a year to $3-million.

PHASE II
When Phase II of the terminal is completed by the year 2011, another 400 workers are expected to be needed by the terminal operator.

RIDLEY TERMINALS
An expansion currently under way at Ridley Terminals is projected to create 25 new positions.

CASINO
A new $13-million casino in the city is estimated to create 30 full- and part-time positions.

SHOPPING COMPLEX
A shopping complex being designed on 25 acres of property formerly owned by B.C. Hydro is projected to generate 350 full- and part-time positions when it is fully occupied.

WIND FARM
A $50-million wind-farm project on Mount Hays will create eight positions.

SAFEWAY
Renovations to the local Safeway, which will include Prince Rupert's first Starbucks, is expected to create another 30 full- and part-time positions.

Fairview Terminal facts

The three cranes that will move containers on and off ships weigh 1,800 tonnes apiece and reach 30 storeys high.

The Canadian National Railway is investing $30-million in railroad upgrades and new equipment for the project.

New Jersey-based Maher Terminals has put $60-million into the terminal.

In May, the port scored its first large ocean-going customer, Shanghai-based China Ocean Shipping Group Co., or COSCO as it is otherwise known.