Safe Harbour

Nova Scotia is no stranger to tragedy. The city was rocked in 1917 by the largest artificial explosion in history, second only to the 1945 atom bomb. The Springhill mining disasters of 1891, 1956 and 1958 collectively killed more than 230 miners. SwissAir Flight 111 plummeted into the sea near Halifax in 1998, killing all 229 people on board. And Hurricane Juan hit the Halifax area in 2003 as a Category 2 hurricane with sustained windspeeds of 105 mp-h, becoming the first major hurricane to hit the area since 1893.

So the province has endured – and most importantly, learned from – each of the tragedies imposed on it, making it the perfect backdrop for the 2007 RIMS Canada Conference. The risk management conference will be held Sept. 16-19 at the World Trade and Conference Centre in Halifax.

Conference co-chairs Bruce Langille and Charles Parker say the theme of the conference this year is: “Lessons of the past, beacons of the future.”

“The reason why we chose that theme is because Nova Scotia, albeit a relatively small province with a population of less than 1 million people, has been impacted – more than many provinces across this country, from the early days of its settlement – by untold, renowned, natural and man-made events,” says Langille, a 31-year veteran of the insurance industry and current risk manager for the province of Nova Scotia.

But tragedies aside, one thing about the city that really impressed the committee was its significance to the Canadian immigrant population, Langille says. “One in 5 people in Canada had a relative that came through Pier 21 as an immigrant,” he notes. “As a result of that, I think most committee members quickly agreed that that’s the biggest risk in life – immigration.”

Parker, who has more than 20 years of experience in the risk management industry, is a risk management specialist at Aliant in New Brunswick. He notes the history of immigration, much like the character of the risk management industry, is all about change. Parker says the evolutionary changes he’s seen within the risk management industry have shaped his experience with the committee when planning the conference and setting the tone for the educational workshops.

HOLISTIC APPROACH

“What we saw was that you can be very focussed on the day-to-day risk, or what we call hazard risks – real property, fleet, and so on and so forth – and the change has been to a more holistic approach with the evolvement and implementation by many of enterprise risk management (ERM).” According to Parker, the risk management profession has seen a “180-degree change from the more stoic hazard perspective to a more holistic corporate governance perspective that involves normal risk management and ERM.”

Specific sessions and speakers at the conference, as of press time, had yet to be hammered out. But Langille says the overall programming of the conference will interconnect both the traditional hazard risk and ERM components. “We will have a large loss/disaster management education component, as well as the traditional educational fare…that we see at conferences, and incorporate that within the ERM education stream.”

RIMS has been around for more than 50 years, but only recently has the profession really begun to gain the recognition it deserves, say Langille and Parker.

“For years, there was always a saying: ‘Full-time risk, part-time risk manager,'” Langille observes. “In other words, someone with other duties within an organization was assigned to buy insurance and look after claims.” But in today’s world, in which there is a requirement for strong corporate governance, corporations have recognized that they require full-time risk managers to address the holistic needs within their organization, Langille notes. Having a full-time risk manager “ultimately reduces the financial impact to any organization of accidental loss or financial loss, or an impact from a corporate governance issue,” he says.

One focus of the conference will be to reaffirm industry best practices, as well as to further the profession’s development, Langille says. “We hope for two things in the educational sessions,” he says. “One is that we have solid verification of the processes that we’re using on a daily basis – our ‘best practices’ of the risk management fraternity. There will be certain education sessions that lead to that; they’re more ‘bread-and-butter,’ basic skills. The other component is that, by bringing in new and unique speakers, we will learn or be able to obtain the newest and the best of practices that have been successful in the risk management community worldwide.”

BASICS STILL APPLY

In today’s global economy, every decision really comes back to the basic principles of risk management, Langille says. Whether they are a product of building a new building or signing a contract, the risks that impact the financial liability of the organization need to be examined. Risk control methods need to be put in place, he adds, whether they be financial controls on interest rate fluctuation or addressing physical hazards. Finally, the risk-financing component must be considered. “The basics, if you will, is really what this all relates to,” says Langille. “It can become very sophisticated, but the basics still apply.”

Parker agrees, saying the committee intends to reflect this in the educational programming at the conference. “We’re planning on having different levels of knowledge for these sessions,” he says. “There’ll be introductory level, medium and advanced levels.” At which point Langille refers to hockey, Canada’s unofficial national sport: “Any coach will tell you that it’s the basic skill levels that really achieve results,” he says. “We are trying at our conference to mesh the two of those together: here are the basic education components, which are a verification that what we’re doing today is correct; the second component is the advanced skill levels, which provide go-forward [skills that will be needed] as risk management becomes a much stronger discipline and gains recognition in all organizations.”

Staying ahead of the curve, while at the same time keeping in mind the lessons of the past, is key, Langille believes. “You really shouldn’t wait to have something imposed on you,” he says, “I think that’s why people come to conferences: they come to learn new and best practices to take back [to their organizations] and be ahead of the curve in the implementation of those [practices] to protect their organization.”

Canada is already ahead of the curve in some risk management practices, Parker notes. For example, corporate governance has been a hot topic around the world, but Canadians have been well aware of this issue for quite some time, Parker notes. To illustrate his point, he cites the release in 1994 of the Dey report, a study completed by the Toronto Stock Exchange, which contains a series of recommendations to improve openness and corporate responsibility. The Dey report preceded the 2002 U.S. Sarbanes-Oxley Act by about eight years, Parker notes. “And now we have Bill198 in Ontario,” he adds. “It’s sort of a reflection of Sarbanes-Oxley. We’re moving forward with these things, but in Canada a lot of the corporate boards were [already] well aware of what they were responsible for.”

The conversations and discussions at the 2007 conference won’t be all business, say the Conference co-chairs. Langille and Parker both note that Maritimers are famous for their hard work ethic, but they are equally renowned for their hospitality – something everyone at the conference will enjoy. The social program is designed around activities that people would associate with the Maritimes, Langille says. “To that end, we’re welcoming everyone to a ‘down-east kitchen party’ as our gala night.”

On the evening of the gala, the Cunard Centre on Pier 23 will be transformed to recreate the atmosphere of a community get-together. Fiddles, singers, fresh seafood, will all lend the flavour to “replicate that rural enter
tainment that provided the community with a cohesiveness that they wouldn’t have had otherwise, due to the remoteness,” Langille says.

Parker sums it up by saying: “The people of the Maritimes and the Atlantic people work hard, but when they get together, they have fun.”