Insights with Don Mills and David Campbell- An Acadia Broadcasting Podcast

On this episode of the "Insights" podcast, Don Mills and David Campbell take a closer look at the importance of the agricultural sector to the economy both across Canada and in Atlantic Canada with a wide-ranging conversation with Sylvain Charlebois - one of Canada's top food experts widely known as the "Food Professor." Charlebois, the Senior Director of the Agri-Foods Analytics Lab at Dalhousie...

Kathryn Lockhart, the CEO of the startup accelerator Propel, says start-up incubators and accelerators are playing a vital role in nurturing the tech sector across Atlantic Canada, supporting, in some way, around 90 per cent of all recent successful tech startups across the region. Lockhart shares her vision of an Atlantic Canada that is home to dozens of ‘baby unicorns’, startups with a valuation...

This episode features a fascinating interview with one of Canada's most distinguished market researchers, Michael Adams, the Chairman and Co-Founder of Environics Research. In this wide-ranging conversation, Michael provides listeners with a data-based analysis of the diverging differences in values between Canadians and Americans through the pioneering work done by Environics in social values res...

David Campbell and Don Mills continue their series profiling the region's top entrepreneurs with one of Atlantic Canada's most successful business leaders, Clearwater Seafoods co-founder John Risley, someone who has been part of building three different companies that sold for more than $1 billion each.

When people think about the Atlantic Lottery Corporation (ALC) they usually focus on lottery tickets and big prizes, but its impact is much greater than that. It's an important contributor to the economy through its role as an employer and the indirect jobs created in the region which support the lottery. ALC has contributed $10-billion since its inception in the 1970s to provincial governments in...

The Century Initiative is a non-partisan, non-profit organization that is advocating an audacious long-term population strategy for Canada to achieve a goal of 100 million Canadians by the end of this century. In conversation with co-host Don Mill, CEO Lisa Lalande outlines the reasoning behind this ambitious goal and what it would mean for Atlantic Canada.

On this week’s podcast, entrepreneur Blair Hyslop, Kathryn Lockhart, CEO of Propel and Jeff Larsen, head of the Creative Destruction Lab in Atlantic Canada, discuss a new proposal for a new regional equity tax credit to help grow investments in the region's companies. Under the proposal, qualified businesses could receive angel investment from across Atlantic Canada and the investors would receive...

Francis McGuire has a very interesting background, having been both a Deputy Minister during the Frank McKenna era and the CEO that built Moncton-based Major Drilling into the second biggest company in its sector in the world. In this edition of the Huddle "Insights" podcast, McGuire talks with co-hosts David Campbell and Don Mills about the strategies he used to grow Major Drilling and the curren...

This week's Huddle "Insights" podcast features a conversation with arguably the most influential IT leader in Atlantic Canada: Gerry Pond. Pond chats with co-host David Campbell about his career starting out in the mid-1960s at NBTel dealing with "party line" complaints in rural New Brunswick rising to CEO of Aliant and then nearly two decades of founding and investing in IT startups across Atlant...

In part two of their conversation with longtime CTV Atlantic broadcaster Steve Murphy, Don and David chat with Steve about his favourite interview in 45 years of broadcasting. Steve also shares his thoughts on the most significant Atlantic Canadian premiers in the last four decades.

In the first of a two-part interview, longtime CTV broadcaster Steve Murphy relinquishes his role as an interviewer and becomes the interviewee, as co-hosts Don Mills and David Campbell quiz him about his 45-year career, including the most significant events he has covered, his assessment of the most consequential premiers, most interesting interviews and how Atlantic Canada has changed over his t...

BioVectra plans to build a facility on Prince Edward Island that will eventually manufacture enough doses of mRNA vaccines to supply all of Canada, which is big news for Canadians as well as Atlantic Canadians. The recent announcement shines a light on a 50-year old company that employs more than 550 people in P.E.I. and Nova Scotia. "There are 35 million-plus Canadians. We could probably within a...

Envision, the new economic development agency for the Great Saint John Region, has just released its five strategic plan that calls for growing the population by 25,000 and the regional economy by 30-35 percent over the next 10 years.  On this week's podcast, Don Mills talks with Envision CEO Paulette Hicks about the organization's aggressive growth plans and the development of a new brand for the...

John Bragg got his entrepreneurial start as a teenager in the blueberry business. He quit law school because he decided he was meant to be a businessman, not a lawyer, and started off down a path that led to the creation of Oxford Frozen Foods and the telecommunications company Eastlink, both headquartered in Nova Scotia. Bragg is one of the Maritimes business titans that have inspired books by Do...

If you haven’t heard of James Mullinger , it’s time to get acquainted. An immigrant from the UK who recently became a Canadian citizen, he is now a central figure in Atlantic Canadian cultural and media circles.  James is a comedian, magazine editor, author, podcaster and, most of all, entrepreneur. He joins Don Mills and David Campbell to talk about his journey and how he became an accidental cha...

35 podcasts. That's roughly 35 hours of conversations with business and thoughts leaders about Atlantic Canada's economic success stories and the challenges and opportunities ahead for the region. On this episode of the "Insights" podcast, Don Mills and David Campbell chat with Huddle editor Mark Leger about the people they've spoken to (a group that includes former Newfoundland finance minister C...

There are relatively few publicly held companies based in Atlantic Canada. In recent years, the region’s high-flying technology companies have typically grown to a point and then sold to a national or international firm. The region is also known for its intergenerational family-owned businesses. Should more firms look at listing on the public stock markets such as the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX)?...

This episode takes a close look at the challenges of fulfilling the promise of delivering high-speed internet to 100 percent of households in Atlantic Canada. News flash, it is not likely going to happen, at least using fibre lines to deliver the service. Our conversation with Lee Bragg of Halifax-based Eastlink provides a much clearer understanding of the challenges for companies that must remain...

In the latest episode of the "Insights" podcast, Don Mills and David Campbell discuss the quality of the education system in Atlantic Canada with Paul Bennett, one of Canada's leading experts on public education.

Addressing climate change is among the most important challenges facing the world today.  However, many questions remain about how it can be accomplished. How long will it take? Who will pay for the transition? What other energy sources will replace fossil fuels? What about nuclear, hydrogen and tidal energy? Neil Jacobsen from the Atlantica Centre for Energy is on the podcast this week to answer...

Charlene Johnson of the Newfoundland and Labrador Oil & Gas Industries Association (Noia) says don't give up on the oil and gas sector just yet. On the podcast this week, the Noia CEO explains why it's a critical part of global efforts to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and an important economic driver in Atlantic Canada going forward.

The ocean sector in Canada is large and growing, currently representing $30-billion in GDP and employing more than 300,000 Canadians. This week, we look at this increasingly important sector of our economy, especially for Atlantic Canada, by looking at the work of COVE (the Centre for Ocean Ventures and Entrepreneurship). In conversation with COVE CEO Melanie Nadeau, we discuss the services and fa...

What started 15 years ago as an idea to build a new industry around a few key assets has grown into an impressive biosciences cluster with 60 firms, 2,200 employees, and more than $300 million worth of exports in 2020. The PEI BioAlliance has been at the centre of the cluster’s development and its CEO Rory Francis talks about its successes and future potential. He also provides insight into how th...

Brian Lee Crowley has little patience for governments that try to spend their way to economic prosperity. He also has no time for the view that Atlantic Canada is less prosperous because it has been mistreated by central Canada since Confederation. Crowley is the managing director and founder of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. He's also the founder and former president of the Atlantic Institute f...