Envision Saint is well-positioned to steward the growth of the Saint John Region as it enters its sixth year of operations. Launched as a new model for economic development in 2021, the agency embarked on the second iteration of its strategic plan in 2025, undertaking a comprehensive consultation process with its funding partners and the broader community to shape its priorities and direction for the next five years, explains Andrew Beckett, CEO of Envision Saint John.
Envision Saint John’s mission is to drive strategic, robust, and sustainable economic growth, attracting visitors, people, business, and investment to the Saint John Region while enhancing an enviable quality of life. The agency employs four strategic pillars to achieve this: Growth Readiness, Talent Attraction and Retention, Business Attraction, Retention, and Expansion, as well as Visitor Attraction.
First let’s look at Growth Readiness—looking to the future that the agency wants to see in the Saint John Region and working backwards to find out how to accomplish it. “Growth readiness includes future-back strategies to address key regional considerations such as our labour force, housing, healthcare recruitment and retention, business and investment attraction, and strategic real estate development, among others.” For example, Envision Saint John plays a key role in supporting developers, non-profits, and everyone involved in housing to ensure projects can move forward. This includes land sourcing, navigating municipal approvals, looking for funding opportunities to get projects get across the line.
Growth readiness can also mean working on infrastructure challenges like improved highway access for increased volumes at Port Saint John or supporting the Saint John Airport in its quest for improved air access.
Related in many ways to the first, the second pillar is Talent Attraction and Retention. Envision Saint John leads initiatives to attract a working population as identified by the needs of local employers. For this to be successful, Beckett says that enticing living environments, housing solutions, economic opportunities, and a high quality of life are needed in the region.
Based on data and the region’s workforce requirements, the agency has been running marketing campaigns in Ontario to encourage people to move east for career opportunities and an amazing quality of life. A new talent attraction initiative espouses the region’s many attributes to post-secondary graduates in the Maritime provinces. Strategies for workforce recruitment in key sectors like healthcare, energy, and logistics and transportation are also important to meet the region’s goals.
The agency’s Talent and Attraction efforts simply would not stand without recognizing and investing in people moving to the city. This includes the region’s immigration strategy, called Pathways to Belonging. This strategy was built in partnership with the Saint John Local Immigration Partnership (SJLIP), which urges “governments, businesses, non-profits, and citizens to work together to build a welcoming, inclusive, and economically resilient community,” says Envision Saint John’s website. The SJLIP brings together local settlement agencies for ongoing discussion and support. The agency provides administrative support for the SJLIP, giving the agency insights into the challenges and opportunities related to immigration in the region.
The third pillar of the plan is Attraction, Retention, and Expansion of local business. Beckett says, “Envision Saint John wants to promote an interconnected business environment,” that supports local businesses and helps them prosper, which can be achieved through support mechanisms in the startup or expansion phases. For instance, the Impact Loan program, which is funded through the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (ACOA), provides startup loans of up to $50,000 for new entrepreneurs to the area at low interest or even interest-free. The agency manages the Impact Loan Program on behalf of ACOA in the Saint John Region. Envision Saint John also publishes growth stories promoting local industry success stories, many of which got their start in the Impact Loan Program.
Beckett emphasizes the role the agency plays in investment attraction, so it has collaborated with important players like Invest In Canada and business development agency Opportunities NB to do so. And, among the global uncertainty and shifting trade relationships created by tariffs imposed by the United States, new sectors like defense and modular construction have come to light as potential growth areas. Envision has even engaged a company in Montreal that will be connecting with as many as 500 companies in emerging areas like these to uncover investment opportunities and introduce Saint John as a place with great business potential.
The final of the four pillars, Visitor Attraction, includes ongoing awareness campaigns in high-affinity markets like Quebec, Ontario, the northeastern United States, the Maritime provinces, and New England to promote the Saint John Region as a premier tourism destination. “We’re looking for whatever we can do to showcase the region,” Beckett says. To achieve this, Envision Saint John is collaborating with Tourism New Brunswick to create a campaign to appeal to people in the Eastern United States to visit or even live in the province.
Envision Saint John also sponsors local events creating vibrant community for both residents and visitors. And in 2025, Envision Saint John launched an online Local Welcome Ambassadors training program for the general public on how to best promote the region, raising awareness of the awesome local experiences and operators.
An area of particular interest for the coming few years is sports tourism, from both visitor attraction and community engagement lenses. In the past 18 months, Saint John has worked with the city of Moncton on a successful joint bid for the 2029 Canada Games, leading to an estimated economic impact of $200 to 300 million. And mostly recently, Envision Saint John rallied a local organizing committee on a successful bid for the 2027 Men’s World Curling Championship, which will bring 18 teams to the city, filling hotels, restaurants and retailers.
The new strategic plan is an all-encompassing effort; it is simply not possible to do the work that Envision Saint John wants to do without the collaborative effort to match. In terms of growing the economy and improving business investment, “There’s no way to do it in isolation,” Beckett says. Over the last two years, the agency has built a planning framework while engaging with the local community. As such, it has developed both a regional economic development strategy and a tourism master plan, both of which were guided by separate community-based steering groups.
Beckett notes that it is important to have good data to support this level of decision-making, and Envision Saint John does its part with a comprehensive, regularly-updated economic dashboard available on its website; this tool has become another important piece in focusing the agency’s efforts and improving decision-making. To be sure, this agency has equipped itself with the tools, the know-how, and the people to make its goals for the next five years a reality. The Envision Saint John team looks forward to continuing continues to work hard to support the growth of its home region into a place recognized nationally and internationally as a go-to destination.
