For years I have watched New Brunswick businesses move their head offices to Toronto or Halifax, usually the result of a business merger or an aquistion, sometimes the result of a corporate bureaucrat’s conclusion that a move was in the best interests of efficiency. When you lose a head office, you lose the heart and sole of a business.

In March this year, Canadian Blood Services (CBS) announced that it will shut down its Saint John blood processing and distribution centre and move it to a new (yet to be constructed) facility in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. The initial reasons given for the move were economic, read cost and greater efficiency. Now it’s about being closer to their biggest customers. The New Brunswick government responded to the CBS announcement with an offer to expand the Saint John facility (at the government’s expense) to keep it in New Brunswick. This week, Dr. Graham Sher, the chief executive officer at CBS, rejected the province’s offer.

Canadian Blood Services claims that it received approval from Provincial and Territorial Governments back in 2008 for a national rationalization of its services and a $118 million investment in a national Facilities Redevelopment Plan to improve the production and distribution of blood and blood products.

The Board of Directors of Canadian Blood Services approved the first phase of this plan, an $83 million investment that includes construction of a new production and distribution facility in Southern and Central Ontario and a $38 million investment in a Dartmouth facility. CBS plans to compensate New Brunswick for its loss by “leasing” new blood donor clinics in Saint John and Moncton. I interpret the word “leasing” as temporary.
According to CBS, the new facilities and related process changes will allow them “to improve productivity, offer employees a better work environment, enhance the volunteer and donor experience, and provide the flexibility and efficiency required to accommodate future needs”. Now there is a slap in the face for New Brunswick.

CBS claims their “customers” in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island will provide significant input into designing the new logistics infrastructure required to support changes. I don’t think so…
CBS boasts that its experience, acquired over ten years of operation, enables it to deliver blood supplies on a “timely” basis. It claims to be committed to providing “a safe, secure, cost-effective, affordable and accessible supply of quality blood and blood products” to the hospitals and patients they serve. Nice thought but a four hour trip on a sunny day does not translate into “timely” delivery in the middle of a Maritime snow storm.

Canadian Blood Services is a not-for-profit, charitable organization whose sole mission is to manage the blood and blood products supply for Canadians. This used to be the responsibility of the Canadian Red Cross. CBS collects approximately 850,000 units of blood annually and processes it into the components and products that are administered to thousands of patients each year. It purports to screen every donor and test each unit of blood or blood product collected for a variety of transmissible diseases.

The decision to move their Saint John processing/distribution centre to Dartmouth, Nova Scotia makes no sense. The decision was obviously taken by people who do not understand Maritime weather patterns and clearly do not understand the geography of the Maritimes. If the blood processing centre needs to be moved, it should be moved to Moncton, not Dartmouth. Moncton is the geographic centre of the Maritimes. Dartmouth is two and a half hours away from Moncton and four hours away from Saint John in the best of conditions.

The idea of depending on Dartmouth to supply blood to New Bruswick hospitals in the middle of winter is a joke. We have winter days when you cannot travel from Dartmouth to Saint John or from Dartmouth to Moncton. The rejection of New Brunswick’s offer of a cost-saving expansion in Saint John is both an insult and an exercise in stupidity.

Blood is essential for surgical procedures and medical therapy. It is critical that blood be available to everyone who needs it, when they need it. The timely availability of blood is often a question of life and death to the patient.
Trial and error experiments with the supply-chain management of blood products cannot and should not be conducted. We have to use other approaches to evaluate the consequences of distance from processing facilities. To suggest that improved productivity, a better work environment, enhanced volunteer experiences and greater efficiency can only be achieved in Dartmouth is to fabricate reality.

The idea that Canadian Blood Services would move its blood processing and distribution centre from New Brunswick to Nova Scotia is wrong-headed, foolish and dangerous. The Minister of Health should hang tough on this one.

W.E. (Bill) Belliveau is a Shediac resident and Moncton business consultant. He can be contacted at bill.bellstrategic@nb.aibn.com