A group of private and public operators with a stake in Sydney’s harbour have mobilized around a comprehensive master plan for the port’s future development. Can they turn it into reality?

Jim Wooder sees things differently than you and I do. Let me illustrate: it’s cocktail hour on a clear, cold, early spring day. There’s not a single sign of life—not a cruise ship, a freighter, or even a gutsy kayaker—on the waters of Sydney Harbour. The car radio hums with bad news about a nearby crack house and a global economy on the verge of collapse.

Yet there sits Wooder, his 6’4” frame shoehorned into the driver’s seat of his Subaru, his face beaming with promise. When he looks West he doesn’t just see an expanse of deep water, a forested point of land splitting the harbour into two channels and the sparse lights of the Cape Breton Regional Municipality winking in the distance. He sees the future. And, Lord, it is wondrous to behold.

In five years time, if the world unfolds as it might, Wooder will be able to see a Cape-size bulk freighter carrying coal from Xstrata Coal Canada Ltd.’s Donkin mine, by then entering its third year of production. Sitting in the same spot, if he shifts the view slightly to the left where trees and rocks now stand, he’ll see a post-Panamax container ship—too long, deep, or wide for the Panama Canal—more than four football fields long, unloading at a brand-spanking new container terminal. If he looks further down the shoreline, his eyes will land on a pair of glimmering cruise ships anchored at the Sydney Marine Terminal, which has doubled its berth capacity to handle a sharp increase in tourist traffic.

Crazy, blue-sky dreaming? Not for a guy who has clocked a five-hour Half Ironman Triathlon and chucked a career with a top-drawer Halifax law firm for the roller coaster ups and downs of the offshore energy industry. Not for someone who can look at a place many still think of as synonymous with last-century industries and economic stagnation and say, with something close to certainty, that five years from now it will bubble with possibility. “The idea that this harbour can again become the key driver for economic activity in the region shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone,” explains Wooder, who has spent the last two and a half   years running Laurentian Energy Corp., Sydport’s owner.

And you find yourself thinking, maybe the man has a point.

It’s not just the 4,000 extra jobs, the $110 million in extra tax revenue, and the spin-off activity that the ambitious new port plan Wooder is pushing might mean to the area. Or the economic critical mass that a retooled waterfront will help build in the region. As much as anything, it’s the symbolism of a vision this big and ambitious being embraced by a community that long ago seemed to have stopped believing in itself. “To turn something around, you need big dreams,” explains Rankin MacSween, the president of New Dawn Enterprises Ltd., a Sydney–based community-development corporation. “Jim Wooder has conceptualized that dream. He’s showing us that it’s not only feasible, it’s logical.”

Dare we even say inevitable? The deep, sheltered, strategically located harbour was what brought the first white European settlers there in the late 18th century. Without the harbour, exploiting the area’s rich coal seams would have been nearly impossible, and one of the world’s biggest steel plants might have remained little more than a glimmer in Boston financier Henry Melville Whitney’s opportunistic eye. In time the railways arrived, flinging Cape Breton’s colliery towns into existence along the shoreline. But outsiders—whether investors in London, Boston, or Montreal, or governments in Ottawa—always controlled the resources. By the mid-1900s, the inexorable forces of global economics had intervened. When the steel plant and the last colliery closed, the harbour had gone just about flat calm. The surrounding towns, which have been emptying out at an alarming rate ever since, lost their raison d’être.

Which explains why a made-in-Cape Breton solution to the region’s economic woes has such appeal. “There’s a new optimism around here,” explains Owen Fitzgerald, the president of the Sydney and Area Chamber of Commerce. “And it’s got nothing to do with a government in Halifax or Ottawa coming in and solving our problems for us.” Make no mistake: there’s still plenty of taxpayers’ money sloshing around; if you saw the July/August 2007 edition of Progress, you already know about the $400 million being spent over eight years to clean up the tar ponds, the physical legacy of the area’s rust-belt past. DEVCO, the Cape Breton Development Corporation, has earmarked $150 million over the next five years to remediate old mine sites in the area for commercial real estate and much-needed recreational space.

But these are reminders of what once was, rather than what could be. Anyone looking for glimmers of the future might want to consider the $300 million that Swiss–based Xstrata is spending to redevelop the mothballed Donkin coal mine. Or the $300 million that European investors are dropping on a high-end resort, complete with a Nick Faldo-designed 18-hole golf course, outside Louisbourg. They might want to have a look at the three multimillion-dollar commercial developments on the books for Sydney’s downtown, and the big retail names—Home Depot, Wal-Mart and Canadian Tire—that recently opened stores in the area.

Most of all, they should note the way community leaders have learned from the folly of putting all the eggs in one basket. Despite Xstrata’s project, no one seriously thinks the area’s future is bound up in the conventional extraction of coal. Instead, they’re counting on an economic revival being led by forward-looking firms in 21st-century industries such as biotech, software engineering, and alternative energy. They’re looking at innovative technologies, such as carbon sequestration—capturing the carbon dioxide from coal and permanently storing it in layers of rock—to breathe new life into the island’s conventional coal industry. “The most natural place to try this is Cape Breton,” says DEVCO president Ross McCurdy. “It will force people to look at the potential of Sydney’s coal field all over again.

And they’re counting on new leaders, such as Membertou Development Corp., the entrepreneurial business arm of a local Mi’kmaq First Nations community, to show the way. “Cape Breton is the new Alberta,” explains Florence, Italy-born Luciano Lisi, chief financial officer of Cape Breton Power Ltd., whose 14 wind turbines looming over the coal town of Lingan could serve as the perfect metaphor for the “new” Cape Breton. “It’s wide open,” he says. “All you need is the right project and the right business plan, and great things are possible.”

Enter the Sydney port master plan, which is quickly gaining traction as the sort of grand economy-altering blueprint for which industrial Cape Breton is searching. At the root of the approach is an understanding of the same shift in global transportation patterns that is driving the Nova Scotia government’s Atlantic Gateway strategy: Pacific Coast ports are too congested, or too small and shallow, to handle the immense amount of Asian trade bound for North America, coupled with the fact that the cargo industry’s growing reliance on mega container ships means that the traditional route to the Atlantic Coast through the Panama Canal is no longer an option. Consequently, shippers from China and India are looking at the other route to North America, through the Suez Canal, creating immense opportunities for East Coast ports deep and wide enough to accommodate mammoth container vessels. Other opportunities have also emerged: Xstrata’s need for a shipping point for Donkin coal, and upside potential for increased cruise ship business for Sydney, as Cape Breton’s allure as a tourism destination continues to spread.

Cashing in on any of this will require an immense effort. The key component: dredging a thin strip of the harbour channel from 11.5 metres to 17 metres deep so that the big ships can move through. If that $30-million to $40-million effort proceeds the other components can fall into place: a two-phase, $300-million, container-terminal development at an unused portion of land by the Sydport Marine Industrial Park; a $50-million upgrade of the international coal pier; a $35-million refurbishment of the Sydport wharfs to handle non-containerized cargo; and a second berth (price tag $15 million) at the existing cruise ship terminal.

Led by Wooder, a group of private and public operators already active around the harbour have come together behind the master plan (see “Strength in numbers” on page 59), which was put together for $400,000 by TEC Inc., a Connecticut–based port development consulting firm. Next step: an environmental assessment of the dredging plan. Then they’re going to need some dough. The feds, who have jurisdiction for Canadian harbours, are the best bet. But they’re sure to demand that private sector partners and the far-from-flush provincial government—which has made the Atlantic Gateway one of the cornerstones of its economic development strategy and recently included the dredging of Sydney’s harbour among its Gateway infrastructure priorities—also kick in a percentage of the costs before they pony up.

Who will pay for the onshore development costs is still anyone’s guess. Sydney Port Corp. would likely try to round up the financing for the second cruise berth, but continue to operate the terminal itself. Sydport’s owner, Laurentian Energy Corp., hopes a private joint-venture consortium of container carriers and experienced terminal operators would buy the land adjacent to the existing industrial park and build and operate the new container terminal there. Xstrata’s plans remain a big question mark: if Donkin goes into production, the Swiss–based company could opt to build a new dock near the mine and ship the coal from there. Or it could decide to build a railroad spur from the Donkin site to Sydney and have the coal loaded onto freighters docked at an upgraded International Coal Terminal or the former SYSCO dock.

“That, of course, is the best-case scenario,” Wooder concedes, sitting in his car watching the sun go down over Sydney Harbour. The worst-case one is that none of these things fall into place. Or the other ports already building capacity to cash in on the post-Panamax container bonanza will beat them to the punch.

Some would call the notion that Sydney could be a player on the world-port stage excessively optimistic—perhaps even naive. Not Jim Wooder, who has taken a secondment from his CEO’s post at Laurentian Energy to chair the Sydney Marine Group to try and turn the port plan into reality.

Like many locals, he would rather think of the ambitions for the port as the manifestation of something else: a new self-confidence that, no matter what, maybe the worst is over and something transformative is nigh. “This community is finally starting to imagine the possibilities,” he says. “It’s hard not to feel excited and passionate about it.” And you find yourself once again thinking, maybe this guy really does have a point.