A conversation with Ty Whittaker

Paul: Welcome to Island Thrive. I’m Paul Holmes, your host. And joining me today as usual is Dave Monahan, the president of Smart Dolphins IT Solutions. How are you, Dave?

 

Dave: Very good, thanks Paul.

 

Paul: Awesome. And special guest today we have Ty Whittaker Executive Vice President of Colliers International, a leading global real estate firm, and thank you so much Ty for joining us today.

 

Ty: Thanks Paul pleasure to be here.

 

Paul: Tell us a little bit about Colliers, your role there and how it came about.

 

Ty: Yeah, so we’re at commercial real estate firm and publicly traded, our Victoria office is quite unique in that we’ve been around since about 1982 and have grown and morphed into what we know as Colliers International today. We’ve got about 15 active brokers, but we’re also the largest commercial real estate manager in Victoria and have that platform, we also have a platform of appraisal services and then project management services as well. We’re sort a commercial entity that can handle small lease negotiations to major infrastructure development projects from start to finish.

 

Paul: Yeah, and I mentioned before the show, I remember Colliers years from when I was very, very young seeing signs up and in the 80s I’m sure in Victoria, so Victoria obviously, traditionally, a great market for this and then obviously a great market for your company. What’s the landscape of the Victoria market historically?

 

Ty: Well, everybody knows we’re a government town, and that really has been the number one economic driver for Victoria traditionally for many, many years, and that’s also provided a whole bunch of stability to our economy. And that’s slowly changing and morphing where our economy is based now on technology. It is a massive part of our economic profile, the Department of National Defense, and all the money that the Federal Government is spending through frigate repair, Department of National Defense infrastructure upgrades, that’s a huge part of our economy as well. Unfortunately, tourism is just getting absolutely hammered right now, but that as been up to the beginning of March, a huge part of our economy. So Victoria has been a very stable economic city, and we’ve benefited from being Canada’s Florida in a way where our residential market is growing and appreciating people are wanting to continually move here. We’re seeing communities such as Langford and Colwood growing exponentially, I think Langford and call would right now are probably one of the fastest growing municipalities in Canada.

 

I know the school district out there is a fastest-growing school district in the province, and the area, in my opinion, I’ve done this now for over 20 years, and I’ve lived in Victoria in my life, I think the island is just ready to explode as sort of being found, and there’s being some pretty major players coming over to the island and making some pretty substantial investment.

 

Dave: So, of course, the big question is, how are things changed this year with Covid and potential recession. Is there a major shift or…a lot of people have different opinions on this. So you’ve got a neat perspective here.

 

Ty: There’s a number of different parts of our economy that are both thriving and there are other parts that are really struggling and suffering. If you’re dealing with tourism and have had a business that had benefited from cruise ships coming to town, hotels benefiting from tourists coming to explore Victoria occupancy in the hotels right now, we’re probably a 25-20%. Tourism-related businesses are probably down 90% from what they were last year, so that’s what one industry that’s absolutely hammered and it’s not going to right itself until we have a solution to this issue, and vaccinations are done and people have the confidence to be able to travel, jump back on planes, jump back on cruise ships and come and explore the island here. And then you have the other end of the spectrum where companies that specialize with an online presence and have online sales, distribution companies, contractors who are related to the residential home building market, all of those folks are extremely busy. And if you talk to contractors, a lot of the major ones can look down the road here and they’re going to be busy for the next two or three years. Restaurants are struggling, in terms of their revenues they are probably at anywhere from 35 to 50%, I think their doors are open and they’re just keeping their employees going and trying their best to be able to make ends meat. And the reality is that we’ve been exposed to this pandemic, probably have some pretty good months for the service industry businesses to actually do okay. I think looking forward, come October, November, December, and what we’re going to be living through in the next probably six to eight months, if we don’t have some solutions and if the government can’t afford to continue on with this, supporting our industry and supporting our economy I think we’re going to have a fair amount of hurt coming up as well. And then you get into the office market, so that’s sort of the retail commentary, the office market right now has probably the ability to host 30% of your staff and workforce and whether business owners are prepared to have their staff come back into the market, government hasn’t necessarily gone back into the office environment, which has a sort of a negative impact as you trickle down with you think of the people that are running a restaurant who benefit from having all these people working downtown, those people aren’t working downtown. The guys that park cars in parcades and generate revenue out of parking lots don’t have people downtown.

 

So there’s just a whole bunch of uncertainty that I think we’re looking around the corner on and wonder how it’s all going to sort of unfold.

 

Paul: Certainly, when I think about retail downtown and restaurants, I remember back in the day, the mantra was really make your money in summer, get by in the off-season, right? Was that still the reality before this hit us?

 

Ty: Yeah, for sure. The ability to have your patio open and benefiting from both having your restaurant inside as well as the patio outside and people spend money. Certainly, there are some very well-established restaurants that are always going to be busy, there’s always going be a fight to get in, and it’s always going to be populated. It’s maybe less fortunate, less fortunate restaurants that benefit from the tourism industry, those are the folks that are going to get hit a little bit more than the Il Terrazo of the world that we all want to go there on a Friday and Saturday night and you can’t get a seat still.

 

Dave: When you talk about the tourism industry, there’s so much infrastructure there, you think hotels, cruises… how does that shake out?

 

Ty: Leading into, I guess, February, March of this year, there was a lot of demand for more hotel space to be constructed, we were sort of getting to a point where occupancy was very, very strong. Rack rates were just through the roof, and there’s a lot of people looking to come to Victoria and support the tourism market by going off and building a new hotel. But the caring costs of running a hotel, and you think of the staff levels that have to be in place to support running a hotel, that’s a lot of jobs that are not able to be supported right now, and the trickle-down effect is, if I’m not going to book a room in your hotel, you’re not generating any revenue, if you are leveraged and have debt to service as a hotel owner, how are you going to pay down your debt and then our banks are going to start getting in trouble. I don’t think we’re…we have been sort of existing in a bit of a false economy over the last five months with government propping everybody up, so all the hotel workers, if they weren’t working in the hotel industry, we’re still able to get some money, and maybe they felt comfortable to go out to restaurants and spend a little bit of that money on themselves and enjoy themselves, the government can’t keep going with this in printing money and supporting our economy.

 

We have to have an economy, and that’s I think where government is sort of struggling right now in terms of balance of supporting the economy, but also supporting people who potentially will have a higher probability of getting Covid and being exposed to it.

 

Paul: I have to imagine that for many of your clients, this is a difficult time to plan anything. If you were thinking of putting together an office or opening an office or combining offices, or moving. Are you finding that a lot of people are just putting plans on hold to sort of see what happens and has that affected your client base and your business?

 

Ty: Yeah, you know it’s quite interesting, I should say. The majority of the stuff that I work on is Business Park industrial sales and leasing, as well as development sales. And those are two kind of different things, but that’s what I’ve specialize in my career over the years. And so I don’t do downtown retail, I know about it and can speak about it and I don’t necessarily do a lot of downtown office and those are kind of the probably two areas where there’s the biggest question marks. Are people going back to work, and are people going to service their office leases, and will all these retailers be able to make a go at? The industrial marketplace that I work in, most of the business parks are full. Most of these industrial or tech users have been managing okay. There’s a ton of last mile logistics companies that are coming to town and needing space and leading up to Covid they didn’t have any options. We have less than one percent vacancy in our industrial marketplace. That’s the case across Canada. The industrial market has been the strongest market segment out of all of them across Canada. And we’re sort of I always liken Vancouver to Major League Fastball, and we’re kind of slow pitch baseball over here, but we always mirror what’s happening in Vancouver, just to a lesser extent on the island here, because to scale we’re just so much smaller.

 

So there actually is a fair amount of positive things that are happening in the industrial marketplace where companies are coming into town and needing to expand their business, their entrepreneurial, they’re growing, and they need to be making plans for not just six months down the road here, but for six years or 20 years down the road. And it’s now time for them to make that move out of the small antiquated warehouse that they might be in and grow into something bigger. So we’re working on a number of business parks that are going be able to cater to that growth and support those groups that are needing to expand. But the frustrating part for these groups is they come into town and they want to be able to slide into a building that exists today, and that doesn’t happen. So we’re now working through a kind of two year cycle of you come into town and you want to move into a 20000 square foot building that doesn’t exist, so we’re going to have to build you something, and the cycle is typically six months to get the zoning in place and get the contracts signed and then probably another 18 months to build the building for you.

 

Paul: I was really surprised to see how quickly the industrial area that connects to the highway 14, the end of Langford there before Sooke filled up. I don’t know if you’re involved with that at all, but they just built it one day and I drove passed there by the other day and it’s like almost full, I guess a lot of that was probably just pre-sold by the sounds of it.

 

Ty: A lot of that was anticipating the demand for industrial. We do statistics sort of every quarter tracking the market and where vacancies at, what kind of absorption there is, what kind of new supply there is. And it’s pretty easy to figure out that there’s a demand out there and of limited supply. So that developer was able to see that and provided the necessary product for a number of companies to come along, he was ultimately selling off parcels. And I find a lot of the clients that I deal with are actually owner-users where they’ve got this nice, wonderful little business, and they see that that business can then buy real estate instead of renting it every month.

 

And at the end of their lifecycle, they’ll then have hopefully some land and building paid off as well as a business that they can transact. And that seems to be a model that continues to happen in Victoria. And that’s where most of the growth is it’s going to be out in that Colwood Langford area where they have the land to be able to support some more business parks. Because if you look downtown there is no land, if you look in Royal Oak that Business Park is full for Saanich, if you look at Keating, there’s a couple of parcels of land, but that’s about it. And then you go even further out into the airport and you’re dealing on lease land that they’ve got the land available, but some people are not interested in doing long-term leases because the land ultimately reverts back to the federal government and the airport.

 

Paul: I get the sense that for the industrial users, social distancing isn’t as much of an issue as the crowded office. Interestingly enough, a few hours ago, we were chatting about some of the industries locally, we’re talking about manufacturing, and a lot of the manufacturing that happens here on the Island they didn’t really need to change a lot with the pandemic in terms of social distancing because they already were fairly socially distanced, the way they were working anyway…

 

Ty: Yeah, your’re right. Being in a square footage of 100 feet, the typical ratio for office is one office space per employee for say a 125-150 sq. ft. You can have a warehouse of a1000 sq. ft and have two people in it or you can have 10000 sq. ft. warehouse and have five people in it, so yeah, there’s not that issue. And I also see government being still about 45% of our entire office environment, and government will do above and beyond the right thing in terms of being highly, highly cautious of having their employees go back to work. If you’re entrepreneurial and you really do need your employees back into work, you’re going to do everything you can to make them feel comfortable, but try to get them in so there can be that communication happening and you can drive towards your revenue goals and have a team focus and a team culture that’s really important to your business.

 

Paul: So it’s weirdly an opportunity in that sense, if you have 100 employees when you had your old office, you might want to double that space…

 

Ty: I’ve had stories of guys who have brought me a listing of the building, and halfway through the listing, they were like, “you know what Ty, I don’t know what’s going on, but we’re busier than we ever have been…this is an engineering firm supporting construction, and we actually need to take that space back that we wanted to give up, because we need the space for elbow room and we need to have everybody working and firing on all cylinders,” and they can’t afford to give that space up. But there’s also examples of companies that have decided to downsize and they think that they can work from home now and have their staff work from home and they’re going to give up office space and that will have a substantial impact on the marketplace if that’s the attitude people have. And again, I think we’re very, very early days into this, and I also think what you’re going to see is not everybody has a lease expiring expires at Christmas time, and it’s easy for them to then back out and not renew the lease, and everybody goes their merry way. People have lease obligations that are three years out, five years out, 10 years out, and they have to continue to service their lease to be in good standing with their landlord, and so they don’t necessarily have that choice of just walking away giving it up because there’s covenants that are involved and landlords have obligations for debt and paying banks, and so it’s just this kind of awkward dance that everybody’s doing right now.

 

Dave: With that work from home move is there any visibility and how that might flow through to residential. Like if I’ve got an office job and I’ve been thrown into my home or work from home, I may not have the space, but if my employer says, “Oh, we’re thinking about this work from home thing long-term.” I might be now looking for a place that’s got some more rooms.

 

Ty: Yeah, I’m not in it to hearing from my pals that sell residential real estate, I’m not hearing that there’s that demand for “ I now need my own office and I’m not going to be going to work anymore and I now need to transact a house to find that special office.” What I am hearing though, is that there’s a bit of a flight from urban centers, and the island in particular is becoming a bit of a hot commodity. The residential market was very, very strong, not necessarily because we missed sort of a spring market, but we’ve had a very, very strong summer market, and just from talking to the fellows that I know that sell real estate, they’re saying that probably if they’re working with six clients, five of them are from out of town. And there is a lot of people who are now not going spend another cold winter back east and be in tight corners or maybe just not like the way that their province handled Covid and are wanting to come out and establish a life out here. And again that goes well for our residential market. I think the average price for homes again, have set a record come July and August, which is kind of unheard of. It doesn’t make sense. And that’s just because we live in such a wonderful place and people want to come and live here.

 

Dave: Yeah, we talked last week about Smart Dolphins thinking about our office space. And again, the work from home thing is quite topical for me and top of mind. So are seeing others rethinking their existing space or maybe a new space in how they lay it out or how they use the space. Like I’m thinking about trying to be more flexible, have more shared space, movable walls, those types of things. Do you get visibility into that or?

 

Ty: Yeah, no, you definitely do. And it’s interesting, I’ll tour through office space, and there’s like two people in the office for an office space of 75, there’s are ghost towns of office space not being occupied right now. And I do think if people are successful at having their employees on task and are able to be super efficient, then yeah, that makes sense, and you’re going have people than buying into that thought process. Having said that, I also think that hopefully by this time next year, everything is going to be back to normal, and the surveys that we’re seeing from staff anyway, and this is kind of across the board that most people want to come back to work and have a place to go to have interactions and a culture of business, and also just somewhere to go. I think we’ve all probably learned that it’s hard to stay home and operate out of your home in tight quarters, and everybody needs a little bit of space and autonomy.

 

Dave: Yeah, we surveyed our team and it was about a third wanted to be back full-time, a third wanted either half and half or hybrid, third one, we’re really doing well from home, so whatever that’s worth.

 

Ty: Yeah, and you as an owner though, have to make sure that the folks that would…the two-thirds of your staff, if you gave them that freedom, are they going to be able to achieve the goals that you want as an owner to deliver tasks and be accountable?

 

Dave: Yeah, it’s a huge challenge.

 

Ty: Yeah, we’ve struggled just with our support staff, who are at home and have the ability to be at home, but I’m used to being able to walk down the hall and talk to three people and have support to write reports and do the things that I need to do on a daily basis. And there’s a delay, and it’s frustrating because it’s a day and half until everything sort of gets going and in our industry works very, very quickly, and the strength of our industry is information and being able to provide that to clients in a really timely manner. And so to me, I’d rather see everybody back working and being there for us but it’s unique for every industry.

 

Dave: Yeah, I want to jump back to you called the area slow pitch, and I think it’s always been a bit of a lifestyle destination, even if you’re coming here to do business and a little slower speed and take four weeks off in the summer type of thing. So I worry a little bit about the area for that competitively globally, things are getting more difficult and so I don’t know…I don’t know if that’s just kind of my skewed view, what’s your sense of it are we going to be able to compete long-term?

 

Ty: Yeah, in my opinion, and I’ve been around long enough to see a lot of people trying to sell Victoria as a destination to do business, and I unfortunately, besides Langford and perhaps Colwood now. We have municipalities that are not necessarily pro-business, and it’s very, very hard to do business in those municipalities, despite maybe what they like to say. The only reason people that work here exist is because a lot of the times it is homegrown and built. We have three universities that feed highly educated people into a workforce, and if they’re involved with technology, for example, they can go off and they’re choosing to live here and choosing to make a life here because of the lifestyle that the island provides, and they can compete in an international environment. But there hasn’t been a ton of examples of companies picking up and coming to Vancouver Island because of the low tax environment or the opportunity to hire skilled employees, there’s a little bit of that, but a lot of the success stories that we see and have dealt with have been brilliant entrepreneurs who have built up these companies and ultimately sell them to somebody outside of Victoria and hopefully the company can stay. So I think you’re right, there’s a lifestyle here that people are attracted to, that’s why our residential market is so strong, and it’s not to say that we don’t have these ambitious entrepreneurial type groups, there’s a ton of them around. And not to say that they don’t have a different drive than somewhere in the big city. But I think in terms of my anecdotal or my commentary on Vancouver and Toronto being the major leagues and us being slow pitch, we’re dealing with the same dynamics in our economy, we’re just much smaller. We’re only 375,000 people in Greater Victoria whereas Vancouver is three and a half million and Toronto. There’s just a different level of economy and a different, I guess, desire to be in a large urban area than what we have over here which is smaller.

 

Paul: Is the lifestyle thing though, is that an asset or a liability? If I put on my Birkenstocks and paddle my kayak to work every morning… Right. That’s been long promoted as an asset to our region.

 

Ty: It is, and to think say if you say you’re a company of some wealth somewhere in Canada, you can come to Victoria Vancouver Island and relocate yourself if you want, and all of a sudden you’re not in that morning traffic that you see every morning in Vancouver commuting for an hour or a half. You can cash out of your home in say, Vancouver, and for the third of the price buy a house on the island here, you can retire here and bring all the wealth that you have from somewhere else and come here. Yeah, the lifestyle, and that’s why I live here, and I think we’re all included at this, we’re all super fortunate to live on this Island and be able to afford to raise the family here and make a home here for sure.

 

Paul: We do pay the island tax though right. Along with the Vancouver housing prices and opportunities, we also don’t have the Vancouver wages, and it’s kind of a different kind of configuration.

 

Ty: It is and in speaking to a colleague of mine in Calgary this morning, for a very, very long time, probably, certainly the previous decade, the amount of wealth that was in Alberta was staggering, the amount of money that everybody was making was staggering, and I tell you, it is totally different now. They feel like they’ve been abandoned by our federal government. And I’ve got a contractor friend who has been growing his business, he’s in Western Canada now, and doing extremely well, and he’s needing to grow in Victoria, there’s no options for him to grow because we just don’t have a lot of land and buildings for him to consider. Going to Calgary, he’s got 30 court ordered sales to look at where the banks are foreclosing on property, and he’s just waiting to hit the bottom of the bottom and buy into something. So yeah, we’ve got this wonderful lifestyle, but we also don’t have an economy that ebs and flows as radically as some other major urban areas. And that’s included even in Vancouver, where the Chinese buyers that were driving up the real market over the last sort of five years, they’re not necessarily there anymore, and single-family home prices, if you thought you’re going to sell your house for 5 million, you’d be lucky to get three for it now, there’s a bit of shift, and we don’t see that massive shift in our little world here.

 

Paul: I think you mentioned Calgary, and I think of sort of the inner cities, I remember Calgary in the 80s and Victoria in the 80s, very empty, hollowed out cores. And I think that was a problem in a lot of cities frankly, in North America. People rushed off in the 60s and 70s to their suburban areas, didn’t find as much need to be downtown, and it seemed to me like in the 90s and the first decade, and probably into the second decade of the new century, a lot of governments got really smart about it, they started doing higher density housing and things like that to try to really grow a neighborhood in downtown areas and stuff, are we at risk with the current situation that we could be looking at hollowed out cores, and I guess particular in Victoria, but other regions other cities as well?

 

Ty: Now Paul, when you say at-risk and being hollowed out, is that related to the office market?

 

Paul: I think everything. Do you want to live downtown? Do you want to work downtown? It’s anecdotal, maybe it’s just a bad perception of my part, but I see a lot of people that complain a lot about crime and drug use and retail have always been a challenge downtown. Sometimes it’s been amazing for many…

 

Ty: There’s a number of facets to that question and you’re right, it’s interesting, I think Vancouver actually is a city in North America, almost led urbanization and densification of their downtown core. There were cities all over the place that that allowed that, but I Vancouver focused on the expo lands, Yaletown and defining some density and having people live downtown. And for the longest time, our city was fighting back against density and they didn’t see any merits and density, which again, when you’re not providing density, you’re not providing housing units and things just become extremely expensive and unaffordable and to the city’s credit, they’ve done some wonderful planning exercises where densification has been allowed. And then the more units that they approve, the more people are moving downtown, and the spill off of that is that the retailers who maybe had to deal with the tourist for two months of the year and then survived through the winter time, they now have a population base that’s living downtown where they’re going out and eating and drinking and buying and consuming, that’s really, really done a great job for our downtown core. Now, what we’re also faced with is this uncontrolled homelessness issue that I think it’s really got to kind of a critical point in our society, and it’s not just that we’re dealing with this every major city deals with this, but it is to a point where it’s kind of out of control, and it’s hard for the city to react to the massive amount of people that they’re dealing with. And I do argue that it should probably be a provincial or federal initiative. You thinking the amount of money that they’ve been spending on trying to keep our economy going and there’s been a lot of money spent to try to house the homeless in total probably over 100 million of all these old hotels that have been bought, but you’re still not dealing with the social issues. I had somebody phone me today who came into Victoria, they started a business, and they’ve been broken into about four times now, and the phone call was, I need to be able to speak to the landlord because I need defense and put barbaric up and keep these people out of my business, and it’s costing me a fortune every time I get vandalized or broken into. Just to finish off the benefit of density is wonderful downtown, but part of this conversation is also dealing with keeping our downtown clean and presentable and walkable…I’ve got a colleague who bought a unit downtown, he’s so proud of it, he can walk in to work, he can go for dinner with his friends and spend money. He’s intimidated to walk to work every morning because of the social issues that we have on our streets. So that is becoming a critical issue for Victoria and we need to see some real leadership on that and we are not seeing it.

 

Dave: So with that, and you talked about the growth in the westshore, is there…we have an overall demand for the area, so maybe that compensates but does that sort of add to Paul’s concern, are we going to see eventually, our downtown is actually in the Westshore, and that’s the…

 

Ty: There’s some pretty major players, massive development groups with a huge war chest of investment money behind them who are buying parcels of land, very large parcels of land, making a play that “you know what is going to become Burnaby, or this is going to become Surrey and this is going to be a town center on itself.” And you got to give Langford and Colwood credit that they are being so pro-development and wanting to have young families living out there and they’re promoting themselves, and I tell you, there’s a lot of those folks that go out there the who say, “I’m not coming into town. I’ve got all of the amenities that I want out there.” And the only amenity that doesn’t exist out there right now is a large amount of office space. And if Colwood and Langford can get office space developed and built for people to be housing their businesses. People will steer away from going downtown for one thing downtown rental rates are for the most part, quite affordable, but then you ask your employee to pay $250 to $300 bucks for a parking stall every month, or commute for 45 minutes, that then becomes less a desirable equation for your employment retention, and that’s…When you deal with a CEO who maybe lives down in Oak Bay and wants to have a five-minute commute into town, those CEOS are now are saying, “you know what, if I have 50 employees and they’re all living out in the Westshore, I’m going to do that drive in order to retain my employees. And make sure that they’re going to be happy.”

 

Paul: So Langford is the new Burnaby.

 

Ty: It will become that for sure. But you also have Saanich competing, and that’s it sort of the insanity of having 13 silly little municipalities and so 375,000 people, but you also have the Saanich doing master planning to try to make Uptown a new Downtown. And all of that land that’s south of Uptown on the way down to Cloverdale and even further down, Saanich wants to see that density, and they want see a large amount of residential built in there. Everybody’s kind of competing to be center ice, and if we can’t deal with our social issues in the downtown, that’s going to become a major problem.

 

Paul: It does kind of make sense when you think about it from a traffic flow and just sort of the dynamics of the massive growth of our area over the last couple of decades that you don’t need everybody to want to go downtown every day. We can survive and thrive as a region by having different pockets in different areas, and that can really help with traffic. People that have to commute downtown, there’s one less vehicle on the road because somebody’s working from an office in the Westshore.

 

Ty: You’re working from home.

 

Well, I do think what downtown has as an advantage though is this densification and putting Covid aside there’s a lot of neat dynamic amenities within our downtown core that certainly young people want to be a part of and they want to live downtown and be a part of that vibe and that will always make downtown attractive.

 

Paul: Well this has been great, thank you so much, Ty for coming on. I get the sense that we could probably keep talking about the issues in the region for a long time. But thank you so much, I think I learned a lot from what you had to share, and I know a lot of these sort of macro issues just happening in the background, and I think you’ve done a great service to our audience by bringing them up-to-date. If somebody wants to get a hold of for their next commercial real estate. What’s the best way to do that?

 

Ty: They can just look me up through Colliers website, Ty Whittaker is probably the best. Shot me an email and I’ll get back to you right away and start a relationship off and see if we can help each other out.

 

Paul: Right on. Well, thank you very much Ty for being with us in Dave. Always a pleasure to see your wonderful face.

 

Dave: Thank you Paul, I’m not sure that’s true but I’ll take it. Thanks Ty.

 

Notes

https://www.collierscanada.com/en-ca/experts/ty-whittaker