BC Business
Nanaimo has been garnering attention from visitors both international and close to home for some time. And now, it's more accessible than ever
It’s not hyperbole to say that one day in 2017 changed a city forever. Amy Ferris and Adrian Symonds, originally from Winnipeg, had been in Vancouver for about a month. Ferris, a graphic designer and photographer, and Symonds, a carpenter, were looking for a change of pace and a locale closer to the ocean. They planned to settle in B.C.’s largest city until they didn’t.
“We spent a day in Nanaimo and fell in love,” says Ferris. “It was so sleepy and quiet but it felt like it was on the verge of something.” As the couple was restarting their lies on the West Coast, they knew they wanted to do something that would have an impact. “Food and beverage was one of the biggest holes we saw—especially coming from Winnipeg, where the entire culture and identity is around food.”
In 2019, Ferris and Symonds opened the doors of White Rabbit, a coffee shop in an old train station. When the pandemic hit, the pair doubled down on community and made the space a hub for the city. Pre-COVID, the owners had already begun making White Rabbit a destination for things like art workshops, shows and events. “Once COVID hit, we couldn’t do anything so we tried to make the messaging as clear and supportive as possible and make people feel like we were a safe choice,” Ferris recalls.
The other half of the train station had been a pub for a decade. When its owners decided to close the doors in 2022, Ferris and Symonds launched Black Rabbit Kitchen, a restaurant and cocktail bar, to cater to the nighttime crowd. The dream of the space being a community hub has now been completely realized—an event space above Black Rabbit holds live music, comedy and open-mic poetry. On weekends, Black Rabbit typically sees over 150 customers a night.
“In order for us to have an exciting, vibrant downtown and city, it takes people just doing things,” says Ferris, who is the director of the board of the Old City Quarter Association. “I think we can get complacent in thinking there’s nothing going on in Nanaimo, but if you actually take a step back and look at some of the things people are doing, there’s a lot of cool stuff to do.”
Everyone in the Lower Mainland has a story about friends or family members finding solace on an island, but often the destination in question is Victoria or something smaller like Bowen or Salt Spring. Nanaimo, however, is seemingly ready for its close-up: no city in the top 10 rose more spots in our Most Resilient Cities rankings than Nanaimo, which now sits at No. 10. Among all of the cities we studied, it had the second-biggest rise overall. By our metrics, Nanaimo saw particularly sizeable jumps in resident sense of belonging and housing starts.
Take a tour around the city and you’ll find that it’s chock full of residents who are optimistic about its future—perhaps none more so than the mayor himself, Leonard Krog. When I go up the hill toward city hall to meet Krog on a frosty, foggy morning, he’s waiting for me in an office that’s dotted with maps, relics and figurines. Most things in the office—other than some Last of Us merch from when the HBO show filmed in Nanaimo last year—seem older than the septuagenarian Krog himself.
Krog is originally from Coombs but started a law practice in Nanaimo in the early ’80s. He was first elected an MLA in 1991 and was re-elected five times before he resigned in 2018 to run for mayor of Nanaimo, a position he won again in 2022. In 2018, city hall was reeling from years of ineffectiveness largely due to a group of councillors colloquially known as the Gang of Five. “All it took was for someone to act like an adult,” he says.
When I posed to people in town what top question they would have for the mayor if they could ask him anything, some were amused by the question. Three separate people simply answered that they could, in fact, ask him anything, directly, if they ever wanted to.
“There’s an awful lot to bring one here and an awful lot of reasons to stay,” says Krog. “It’s not like what Father Leo Roberts said in 1972, when he called [Nanaimo] a coal town with a coal town’s mentality. In those days it was starting to turn but was still a community where you wanted to come from but not come to.”
In the 2021 census, the Nanaimo metropolitan area was named one of the country’s five fastest-growing regions, a fact Krog happily notes while making his point about the city’s evolution since that diss from the clergyman. “The biggest growth was in 25-to-44-year-olds,” he says. “Those are the folks that are pursuing careers, buying houses, having kids, being productive. To me, that’s important.”
Krog also points to Vancouver Island University as an important piece in the city’s efforts to gather newcomers: “Last year, VIU graduated students from 89 different countries. It’s a small university, yet it’s attracted people from around the world, many of whom want to stay.” He calls Nanaimo’s population of some 108,000 a “diverse and attractive community.”
There are challenges, of course. Krog has been open about advocating for secure and voluntary care for some of the city’s more vulnerable residents for a long time—well before his old party, the BC NDP, adopted the same messaging ahead of last year’s provincial election. He also notes that the city is large in area relative to its amount of residents, making it tough to manage infrastructure like bike lanes and transit.
His eye, of course, often wanders toward attracting others to the city: “I asked [Tourism Nanaimo executive director] Carly [Pereboom] where our growth for tourism is going to come from—other Islanders, Vancouver, out of province, international? And she said, quite wisely I think, that it’s the Lower Mainland, particularly with the transportation and the costs in Vancouver. If you want a weekend away, come here without a vehicle, explore the downtown. So much is available within walking distance.” And maybe, like Amy Ferris and Adrian Symonds eight years ago, you’ll end up staying.
Tourism Nanaimo recently launched an aggressive, colourful campaign called “Nanaimo Normal” that puts the spotlight on the city’s character, embracing some of the rough-around-the-edges reputation that has bogged down the city for years and trying to repurpose it in an eclectic way.
“I used to come to Nanaimo as a kid, and I had that old Vancouver Island perspective of it—dirty, gritty, not a place you want to go,” says Angela Caparelli, operations manager for Tourism Nanaimo. “But in the past few years, it’s become the diamond in the rough of the Island. No one expects to find what they find here. It’s a beautiful little city.”
The new brand efforts have accentuated that image, says Emma Wassmer, marketing director of Tourism Nanaimo. “It’s given us that voice to go for it—to dive into this vibrant, beautiful community. We’re bright, colourful, unapologetically ourselves. You can be who you are here, and everybody’s welcome.”
One of the city’s main downtown thoroughfares, Commercial Street, is currently under construction. Some of it was necessary—a water main needed replacing—but the city decided to add in other improvements, like flattened curbs and improved lighting.
“Even with the closures, the positivity of wanting to support local is there,” says Wassmer. “The street is closed but the businesses are still open. We’ve been seeing the community come together and support them.”
Morgane Riddell, who manages the visitor’s centre—which last year moved into a large location in the Vancouver Island Conference Centre—agrees: “The whole city is like that. Each business helps the community. They’re always giving back and that’s what we want to reflect in our brand.”
The conference centre and its almost 40,000 square feet of space is key for bringing in out-of-towners as Nanaimo tries to position itself as a business hub. To that end, a key recent hire for the city has been Gina Bethel, who joined Tourism Nanaimo in 2022 for the newly created role of business development manager of meetings, conferences and sport.
Much of Bethel’s job is in bringing large, multi-day or national conferences to the city, either at the conference centre or at the Coast Bastion Hotel, which has a conference space for smaller groups. She’s been busy—the conference schedule is close to fully booked up for the next two years.
“Some people think nothing happens in Nanaimo; they think the conference centre is a white elephant. But they have nothing to back that up,” says Bethel. “When [the conference centre] was built 15 years ago there was a referendum—52 percent of voters said yes. A lot of people want to see it fail and don’t understand the benefit of conferences and meetings.”
In 2017, voters roundly defeated a proposal for a new $80-million events centre that would have included a hockey arena, a decision that was largely seen as a rejection of the then-council.
“For so long, conferences always went to Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Toronto, Ottawa. Smaller cities didn’t have the capability,” says Bethel. “Now there’s places like Nanaimo, Kelowna, Lethbridge. Those places are now saying, ‘We have flexibility, we’re outside the box, we’re cheaper than those other destinations. You can get to us easily.’”
That last part is in no small way buoyed by the creation of Hullo Ferries, which was launched in August 2023 and takes passengers directly between Vancouver and Nanaimo for about $40 each way. Rides typically last 70 minutes. Hullo, run by the Vancouver Island Ferry Co., was privately financed by Toronto-based Conqora Capital Partners and international investor InfraRed Capital Partners, in partnership with the Port Authority of Nanaimo and the Snuneymuxw First Nation, who are also majority owners of the city’s new Courtyard by Marriott hotel.
“The convention centre, that’s a better facility than Victoria or Penticton have, but we’ve never been thought of as a conference destination because we don’t have enough hotel rooms. Now we do,” says David McQuinn, general manager of the Coast Bastion Hotel, Nanaimo’s largest, and a long-time member and former chair of the BC Hotel Association. “We’ll fill in the business over the next couple of years. [The hospitality scene] is much better than it was even five years ago. The hotel rooms are all modern; there are so many cool new restaurants around town. It’s just a matter of time before the world notices us.”
Hullo, of course, has a role to play there. According to the company, it has carried more than 650,000 passengers since launch. Monthly passenger growth has reportedly been in the 50-percent range recently. On nights when the Canucks are playing at Rogers Arena or when there are big concerts at BC Place (hello, Rolling Stones and Taylor Swift), the company adds extra sailings that typically sell out.
“I feel like this town, with so much potential, is realizing it over the last couple of years,” says Xander France, director of marketing and sales at Hullo. France was raised in Nanaimo but left to work in the cannabis and beer industries in Vancouver for 10 years before coming back to work at Hullo in 2022.
“Buildings that were left alone are being renovated, investment in the community is happening. Our partners, the Snuneymuxw First Nation, are owners of the new hotel, which is great for downtown,” France says. “And the Howard Johnson Hotel, which has been in poor shape for 10 years—the First Nation struck a deal with government to take it over and I’ve seen more change on that site in the last month than in the last 10 years. Things are happening.”
Vancouver Island residents have been burned by alternatives to BC Ferries in the past, but France is confident that Hullo will flourish. “I think it’s the diligence that our team did,” he says when asked why the company has been able to succeed so far. “We met with the owners of [other ferry operators] to ask, ‘What did you do right, what did you do wrong?’ We overcame some challenges by getting two vessels, partnering with Damen Shipyards, the same folks who build for BC Ferries. We have a full-service team and an ownership group that’s all in.”
Hullo has over 100 employees, with its headquarters in Nanaimo, and offers passengers free shuttle service directly to the city’s downtown core. The company does envision eventually expanding to Victoria as well.
“It’s an ode to our leadership and the way our company works,” France says. “It’s about iteration—where we are today isn’t going to be where we are in two months. We keep improving and evolving service. It’s going to keep getting better.”
The city has also recently made moves to elevate its business scene. Pivotal among those has been the hiring of Colin Stansfield, who was brought on last year to head the Nanaimo Prosperity Corporation with the mandate to develop economic opportunities for the region.
“What drew my attention was when Nanaimo signed on to doughnut economics as being its driving economic model for the future planning of the city,” says Stansfield, the former executive director of the Sunshine Coast Regional Economic Development Organization. According to the Prosperity Corporation, Nanaimo is the first and only North American city to use doughnut economics as a guiding principle, joining cities like Amsterdam, Berlin and Melbourne. The theory contends that environment, society and economy are deeply interconnected and can’t be separated.
“It’s progressive and future-oriented—it centres people and place in an economy and makes sure that the benefits are shared equitably,” says Stansfield. “Nanaimo is looking ahead—it’s thinking about that next generation of where it’s going to be. It has that sweet spot of building on its recent history and its long-standing history, time immemorial, of great local host Nations doing incredible work.”
Asked about the potential blue- and white-collar divide in the city, Stansfield simply replies, “It hasn’t shown up as a divide for me. If you go to a chamber of commerce meeting, every stripe of business is showing up in that room and I’m fielding questions from all those perspectives. You go to the rugby club on a Thursday night, it’s both suits and Carhartts dropping kids off in BMWs and Dodge Ram pickups. It’s a city of diversity and that’s what makes it sweet. You have that blue-collar work ethic with the working harbour, and you have remote workers showing up whose go-to tool is a MacBook. They’re all choosing to be here and invest in that future.”
When asked what industries he’s particularly excited about, Stansfield singles out the life sciences sector. “That’s where there’s the greatest potential for us right now, around the care economy,” he says.
“Nanaimo has a tertiary hospital—we need to expand it, which has been on the books for some time. Not only for the social justice component to get the people north of the Malahat all the care they deserve, but also for the socioeconomic opportunities that flow from investment into a care facility. The tower itself, but also the local procurement and hiring and the ancillary industries that will spring up alongside hospital expansion and how it drives innovation into life sciences.”
For Amy Ferris, jumping into the hospitality industry and creating a community around an old train station has been both a dream come true and a work in progress. Many now look to her to answer important questions and to help shape the city.
“We’re learning to tell our story but also using it as a tool to encourage more people to learn about what we’re doing,” she says. “I’m connected with the young business community that’s here. There are lots of new spots opening up downtown and they’re all run by younger people who saw somebody else do it and said, ‘I can do that too.’”
People have been coming to Leonard Krog for help in Nanaimo for decades and he’s seen the city change and shift many times before. Is it just meaningless platitudes when he insists that it’s in better shape than it has ever been before? When he talks about its bright future? It’s hard to know. At the very least, Krog is very aware how the platitudes sound coming from him.
“From my perspective, we have everything going for us, which is a lovely thing for any mayor to be able to say,” says Krog with a chuckle. “My standard joke is that every mayor says they’re mayor of the best and finest, most wonderful city in the world, et cetera. But the others are full of BS—I know I’m telling the truth.”