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Foreign investment and local productivity focus of new Squamish economic plan

Squamish will spend $25,000 on economic blueprint
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Attracting foreign investment from the U.S. and China, as well as growing the local economy are key goals of an economic plan for Squamish that will be developed this year.

After spending much of 2018 studying existing industries and job sectors, the District’s economic officer Kate Mulligan will be turning her attention on creating a more concrete plan of action to spur economic productivity.

“The goal is a simple action plan around each of our sectors to the complexity of actually implementing,” she told The Chief.

“They may be complex but we really need to know step-by-step what are the different actions that we require in order to help propel growth.”

At its meeting on Mar. 19, council unanimously supported Mulligan’s proposal.

As a result, the District will shell out $25,000 for the strategy’s creation. It will match a federal government grant giving the same amount of cash.

Altogether, combining the federal money and the District’s contribution, this would total $50,000 for the project. The federal grant requires a matching contribution from the District.

As part of the federal grant’s conditions, the plan should include ways to spur investment from the U.S. and China.

According to Mulligan, foreign investors are already taking some interest in the town.

“The goal being to try to propel that forward,” she said.

Another condition for taking the federal money is that the plan must focus on digital media, environmental and renewable-energy technology.

Mulligan told council the plan will be focusing on spurring productivity in what she called Squamish’s “core and enabling sectors.”

These are education, high technology, creative industries, transportation, tourism and forestry.

“We happened to lucky enough to receive funding from the federal government and a part of the requirement of that is that we do make it investment-attraction focused,” Mulligan said.

“However, the goal will be to create a plan that’s definitely about the retention and expansion of existing businesses here.”

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