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Home > About BNE > Press Room > 2005 Archive > December > Canadian Campaign Article

Buffalo News - October 31, 2005

15 Canadian companies lured by ad campaign to locate here

Western New York seen as the logistics capital of the world for Canada

By MICHELLE KEARNS
News Business Reporter

When Canadian Leslie Woodward was thinking of taking a local developer up on his offer to build a propane hose factory and office, her father in Toronto worried about the complications of expanding and having a more permanent place on this side of the border.

They already had rental space in the Town of Tonawanda. What if their company got set up in a new industrial park in Wheatfield and no one else moved in nearby? What if the fluctuating exchange rate made their investment worthless?

The company her father founded in 1969 was doing a good business as a hose and valve maker and distributor across Canada and some of the United States.

"My father was all freaked out," said Woodward, president of Fairview Fittings & Mfg., who commutes to the Woodlands industrial park from Niagara-on-the-Lake.

Her father went along with it. Three years went by. Business is even better. Her father is thrilled. "He thinks it's a beautiful spot," said Woodward of their custom-built factory in the tree-lined park with curving drives. Fairview pulled off the kind of expansion that people on the Western New York side of the border have been working to get Canadian companies to do more of - with one regional organization's 3-year-old ad campaign, the lure of grant money and loans, lowered electric rates, seminars designed to demystify such moves, free advice and old-fashioned networking.

In the last three years, the economic development agency Buffalo Niagara Enterprise, which markets the eight-county local region, has spent some $100,000 annually on marketing with print ads and radio spots. "We'll come right to your business to help you expand," says one running lately in Toronto's Globe and Mail newspaper.

So far the BNE's efforts have drawn 15 companies to do more business here, from an $8.5 million veal farm with 15 workers in Elba to a company that makes computer power supplies and spent $260,000 to set up distribution system here.