Don Mills — Frank McKenna Awards 2026 honouree

“We need to inspire the next generation to see what’s possible … and point out that we can compete with anybody.”

It’s not often that Don Mills has a free moment to chat, but on a rainy weekday he found a spare hour before he had to head to the airport to continue a speaking tour addressing issues that have captured his attention for the past five decades and been foundational to the growth of Canada’s East Coast.

Mills was off to a conference in St. John’s, N.L., to share insights from Bolder Ambitions: Greater Prosperity for All, a sweeping report that outlines strategic recommendations for population growth, investment and trade across the Atlantic provinces.

The document, produced by the private-sector led Atlantic Economic Panel and chaired by Mills, served as a blueprint to strengthen the region’s economy and its ability to compete globally. For Mills, it also represented a bit of a full-circle moment in a career centred on understanding and advocating for ways to unlock the potential of Atlantic Canada.

“I think we put out a big vision for what needs to be done,” he says from his home in Halifax. “So, I kind of think everything that I did in my whole life led to this moment. It is kind of a capstone, I guess, for the work I’ve been doing for 50 years.”

That work started almost by chance when Mills, now president of his family investment firm Crane Cove Holdings Ltd., was doing his MBA in marketing at Dalhousie University. Between his first and second year, he bought into a group that ran a student consulting company, called Atlantic Business Consultants. The company lasted 30 years, spawned another enterprise and provided research that ultimately helped create the Atlantic Lottery Corp.

More importantly, it introduced him to the world of market research, a sector that fed his curiosity, and interest in data and numbers.

“It got the entrepreneurial thing going with me and I discovered the thing that I wanted to do,” says Mills, who was born in Sherbrooke, Que., but moved to Nova Scotia after his father was transferred to the area.

The revelation led Mills to launch Corporate Research Associate’s in 1978 with his wife and another couple, making it the region’s first market research company and the business he would lead for 40 years before selling it in 2018, having grown from a staff of four to more than 30 today as Narrative Research. The company was also instrumental in developing the market research industry in the region and proving that the work could be done at home rather than by companies brought in from central Canada. “It just kind of showed that we could compete with anybody,” says Mills.

The notion is one that has been a motivating force for Mills, now 76 and showing no signs of slowing down. It features heavily in all of his wide-ranging pursuits and is at the heart of Bolder Ambitions. The report and its seven recommendations are meant to nudge the region out of its reliance on public sector jobs and reawaken an entrepreneurial drive by helping businesses scale.

It calls for the four Atlantic Canadian provinces to act as one economic region, integrate electricity grids, develop natural resources and create a $1-billion fund to address a financing gap. Federal Justice Minister Sean Fraser, who is also responsible for the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, said at the time of its release that the region “has real momentum, but momentum alone will not deliver the prosperity we want for the region. The next step is to identify where we can move quickly, where we need to act together as a region and where businesses and other partners need to lead. This report should not sit on a shelf. It should challenge all of us to raise our ambition for Atlantic Canada.”

The message aligns nicely with Mills’ optimistic outlook for this part of the country, which he says is seeing ambition grow in the private sector with help from immigrants who are more inclined to start their own businesses. Mills, who had left CRA and was writing columns for regional newspapers, started a podcast with economist David Campbell to discuss economic development, policy and prosperity in Atlantic Canada with some of the region’s most prominent business leaders and influencers.

About a year-and-a-half into the podcast, he began to notice that “more interesting companies were doing interesting things” and thought it may signal a shift in attitude when it came to startups and risk tolerance.

The discovery spurred Mills and Campbell on to write, Toward Prosperity: The Transformation of Atlantic Canada’s Economy, a deep dive into how the East Coast is re-emerging as a strong entrepreneurial player in the country, particularly when it comes to renewable energy and natural resource development.

The pair is taking that examination further and are working on a new book that will profile small to medium-sized companies that people may know little about, but which constitute about 98 per cent of businesses and are keystones in communities throughout the region.

“I think we have a more ambitious private sector than we’ve had for a long time,” he says. “We need to inspire the next generation to see what’s possible by working from this region. So, we need models of success and that’s why we’re doing a book to point out that we can compete with anybody.”

The steady, unremitting pace of his work has also seen Mills join a lengthy list of boards and organizations, including the Halifax International Airport Authority, Halifax Chamber of Commerce, Halifax Partnership, IWK Foundation, Atlantic Institute of Market Studies and the Arthritis Society, among many others.

Three months after selling his research business at the end of 2018, he purchased CABCO Technologies with his son and brother and has more than doubled the company in size since then. They recently acquired a Moncton-based company that will further increase CABCO’s size by 40 per cent, a testament he says to what is possible in a relatively short period of time in this region. “We need to have more companies scaling in this region and I think the company we have is living proof of how we can do that.”

Asked if has thought about retiring or, Mills chuckles and says “the concept of retirement” just doesn’t really appeal to him.

“Maybe it’s because I ran my own business for so long, but I have to get up and have a purpose. I get up every morning excited about the day.”

PPF’s Frank McKenna Awards 2026 celebrate  leaders whose ingenuity and initiative are helping to drive change in Atlantic Canada. This year’s event will take place on Oct. 29 in Moncton. Register now.