Dr. Greg Finnegan is a Senior Consultant with thirty years of experience in socio-economic and environmental analysis. He has worked in the private and public sectors with experience in statistics, green land development and environmental technology assessment, environmental and archival research as well as public facilitation, consultation and communications. Greg has extensive university teaching and project management experience. He holds a Ph.D. in Geography from York University in the sub-disciplines of historical and political geography and has taught in Geography, Environmental Studies and Canadian Studies in universities across Canada. He is DPRA Canada’s senior consultant in the new Whitehorse Office which opened in 2011.
Dr. Finnegan has extensive experience in the analysis and use of socio-economic data and its dissemination in evidence-based policy making in government and its application in land development projects. Under his direction Yukon Statistics initiated a number of unique projects including an internet-based data liberation project that can be used by consultants anywhere, who are working on Yukon socio-economic research issues (see: http://sewp.gov.yk.ca) and a socio-economic studies conference Polar Statistics: Labour and Demography in a Cold Land. As well he launched a first of its kind longitudinal High School exit survey and managed a five-year run of the Yukon Business and Labour Survey. Both of these products are unique to the Yukon. The business survey database creates a substantial baseline for understanding a wide range of issues regarding the Yukon’s economy and labour market, including First Nation’s participation in the private sector, women in business, the geography of business in the Yukon and labour demand and retention, while the High School exit survey creates the base line for understanding the transition from High School into the labour market for Yukon’s youth.
While managing the Bureau of Statistics, Greg introduced the concept of training First Nations statisticians; the first project of its kind at the Provincial/Territorial level. This resulted in the publication of 14 Yukon First Nations statistical profiles as well as the research for tables that show the high level of mobility within the First Nations communities. Greg also worked tirelessly to promote First Nations community skills surveys, making the survey instrument available to aboriginal communities, as well as completing skills surveys for the Kwanlin Dun First Nation and the First Nation of Nacho Na Dun (Mayo). These surveys helped create human resources inventories that match First Nation people with job opportunities in their communities. In Mayo this work has assisted resource extraction companies to connect local residents with jobs in their firms, reducing the dependency on fly-in workers. Of the skills survey one Human Resources manager said this data base in changing lives, while a senior representative of another First Nation noted that it is a great piece of work.
Greg also has experience in the private sector in land development and land use planning. He was involved with a number of medium scale land development projects in the Vancouver area (under 200-acres) as well as a 640-acre infill suburb in Red Deer, Alberta. He is experienced in bringing together teams of land development consultants to tackle land use planning, environmental assessments and geotechnical analysis as well as dealing with NIMBY-based community facilitations. Indeed, the firm he worked for specialized in acquiring NIMBY-ed land development projects. His land development consultancies have required extensive public hearings in often hostile communities and through multiple municipal readings as well as extensive meetings with architects, engineers and city planning officials. He has experience working with municipal, provincial and federal assessment regimes and has been able to merge a knowledge of changing regulatory regimes with innovative green technological opportunities for land development.
Greg’s land development work allowed him to champion a number of unique technology sector cluster studies that were funded by the Federal and BC Provincial governments on innovative green technologies in the water, wastewater and water reuse as well as alternative energies sectors. These studies in turn allowed him to bring together technology developers with government advocates for green technology design with funding agencies including venture capitalist and angel investors.
Over the years Greg has also been involved with the conceptualization and management of conferences; for which he has also played the role of master of ceremonies. These have ranged from the more general Canadian Association of Geographers through to a specialized Polar Statistics conference in October, 2010. Greg was also the lead on a green technologies conference that brought together investors with technology developers and senior government bureaucrats to the discuss ways and means of jump starting innovative environmental technology solutions in western Canada and for international export. He also was the convener of a Canadian ocean energy technologies workshop that brought together highly combative technology developers with public funding agencies who had been historically sceptical of their claims.
Dr. Finnegan is also a skilled facilitator, often working on environmental, technological and land development projects that have the potential for considerable controversy. He works towards improving communications, developing and maintaining meaningful dialogue among the parties, integrating competing interests, while attempting to achieve consensus and chart a path forward. He has provided services to focus groups and technical workshops, managed discussion groups and multi-stakeholder meetings, often bringing together groups that have been mutually hostile towards each other.
Archival research is another unique aspect of Greg’s research and publications experience; having worked on environmental and socio-economic studies that have taken him into archives across Canada. Some of these include the National Archives and Library of Canada, the Ontario, Saskatchewan and Yukon archives, City Archives in Ottawa and Toronto as well as the Glen Bow Museum archives and various corporate archives. Greg’s work has contributed to atlas sheets in the Historical Atlas of Canada and to the National Atlas. His archival research has spanned environmental research on past landscapes and land ownership patterns to First Nations land claims to studies on the location and production at past industrial and resource sites. Finally, Greg has been on the forefront of the GIS technology field at various points in his career, having been the acting Chief Geographer of Canada who created the first fully digital base map in the Canadian National Atlas series (North America sheet map) as well as having added bathymetry to all Canada base maps within the series.
email: Greg.Finnegan [at] dpra.com