Ben Collings-Mackay says he knows how he’s going to spend the $45,000 he received for the prestigious Frank H. Sobey scholarship.
Collings-Mackay, a fourth-year business student at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, N.S., and a fourth-generation lobster fisherman, is one of eight recipients this year of the scholarship for Atlantic Canadian business students. He has a business focused on creating a life-jacket for commercial fishermen that is less cumbersome than traditional ones.
The life-jacket would inflate automatically when someone hits the water and would have a GPS feature that sends out pings to nearby boats and emergency services detailing the overboard person’s location, said Collings-Mackay. A strobe light on the jacket would also help make it easier to locate the person.
Collings-Mackay said his company, CM Marine Safety Equipment, is working with a law firm and hopes to file patent applications within the next few weeks.
He said the company has been working with an engineering firm to develop a prototype of the life-jacket and aims to get it built this summer. The device would be tested in preparation for approval by regulatory agencies such as Transport Canada and the United States Coast Guard.
“Engineers and lawyers aren’t cheap,” said Collings-Mackay, a 22-year-old from Montague, P.E.I. “And it’s going to be great to be able to keep pushing this project further down the road and get it one step closer to saving somebody’s life. This is what this award means.”
For Collings-Mackay, safety on the water is personal.
In June 1958, his great-grandfather and a colleague had just sold their catch for the day. When they were going back to shore in a light plywood dinghy — according to the June 6, 1958, Charlottetown Guardian — the boat capsized, throwing the pair into a swift outgoing tide. Collings-Mackay’s great-grandfather managed to grab on to a mooring rope that was running between a buoy and a boat anchored ashore, and pulled himself to safety. His colleague, Ernest Brown, was swept away with the tide and died.
And on Collings-Mackay’s first day of fishing, which came after his first year of university, he got a reminder of the dangers on the water.
When a boat pulled up beside the one Collings-Mackay was on, he noticed a man who was soaking wet and a bit wobbly. When the man had been out at sea, he was knocked overboard but managed to survive.
Collings-Mackay asked himself why the person wasn’t wearing a life-jacket. But he soon had a different perspective about life-jackets when he was out working.
“You realize why people don’t wear them and how they’re just completely inadequate for the job,” he said, noting they’re bulky, get caught on things and get in the way of carrying out one’s duties.
As well, Collings-Mackay said, there’s a stigma around life-jackets.
“Fishing is a very generational, traditional industry,” he said. “People fish with their fathers and their grandfathers and they never wear them, so why would they? And I think there’s also a bit of a peer pressure there as well to fit in maybe, as silly as it may sound.”
From 1999 to 2021, the average number of deaths per year on Canadian commercial fishing vessels was about 12. In nearly half of the instances, a lack of personal flotation devices was the reason.
Mary Oxner is one of Collings-Mackay’s accounting professors. She said the scope of what he is working on is far more complex than businesses many other students set up.
“This is an expensive thing to bring to market,” she said. “It requires extensive testing, it requires a patent, it requires legal consult, it requires technical and engineering support … it’s a complex thing to do when you’re a young 20-something-year-old to try to pull all of those supports and resources.”
Collings-Mackay’s entrepreneurial aspirations are a far cry from his original life plans. Growing up, he always figured he’d join the military. (He does serve in the Nova Scotia Highlanders reserve unit.) He said his parents encouraged him to focus on getting an education.
School didn’t always come easy to Collings-Mackay, who struggled and had to be tutored in math in secondary school, which is surprising given he majors in accounting today.
“If I didn’t come to school, I would have never done this project,” he said. “And I think it’s really giving me a purpose, something that I can achieve and strive towards.”
That motivation comes in part from the people who have invested in his company, but also the safety of loved ones.
“Whenever I pitch, I say it’s no greater motivation than having all your friends and family out there fishing every day without a life-jacket on,” he said. “It’s a tragedy waiting to happen.”
