Canadian billionaire Jim Pattison is the chairman and CEO of the country’s second-largest privately-held company, the Jim Pattison Group. It employs thousands of people, with investments spanning the forestry, entertainment, and retail sectors – and beyond.
He joined BNN to discuss looming minimum wage hikes, Vancouver real estate, NAFTA – and even Bitcoin. Here’s some of what he had to say:
ON NAFTA
“It’s hugely important to Canada and to all of us here because we export so much of our exports to the United States and a lot of our jobs depend on that … We certainly are thinking about it and looking at the possibilities that we may have. But we’ll cross that bridge when we get there – if we get there.”
ON FREE TRADE WITH CHINA
“We’ve been doing business with China for a number of years in various businesses. It’s not a new idea for us – we’ve been at it for a while. In fact, we have offices in China. So we’ll see what happens. I’m optimistic.”
ON THE AMAZON IMPACT
“We’ll have to see what it does. It’s certainly a very huge, new, important competitor coming into the market. So it will have an effect and the question is how will we react to it – and that remains to be seen. We have -- as every other grocer I think in Canada has -- been concentrating on home delivery, and click-and-collect, and that type of thing. So the business is changing by itself with what’s happening. And Amazon is just going to make it that much more interesting.”
ON MINIMUM WAGE HIKES
“It’s certainly being legislated and that’s going to affect the people in the grocery business significantly. And I think probably you’re going to see some layoffs to try to cope with the rising costs and more competitiveness.”
ON VANCOUVER HOUSING
“The housing situation in Vancouver is very, very expensive. It is very difficult particularly for young people to live here compared to their families before them years ago…I think it’s the number one issue we have here.”
ON BITCOIN
“We’ve been following it actually for, I don’t know, two or three or four years – but we’ve never invested in it up to now. We just don’t know enough about it. We can get into enough trouble all by ourselves with something we think we know something about without getting involved with [Bitcoin] at this stage of the game.”
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