Alberta’s 50 Most Influential People
Meet the people behind the issues -- the declaration sums up this year's list of the province's 50 Most Influential People
by Tracy Hyatt, Noémi LoPinto, Michael McCullough, Dan Rubinstein and Jesse Semko
Lloyd Snelgrove
HOLDER of the Provincial Purse Strings
In his role as president of the Treasury Board, Lloyd Snelgrove manages government expenditures (including a capital budget that’s estimated to total $18 billion over the next three years). It’s a fitting role for this fiscal conservative from Vermilion. During the years of the Klein government, Snelgrove earned a reputation as a guy quick to question the ease with which some departments tossed away money.
Don and Ruth Taylor
Dynamic Duo
In late 2006, power couple Don and Ruth Taylor announced a donation of $25 million to the University of Calgary, to transform the Campus Calgary Digital Library. The new Taylor Family Digital Library will be the cornerstone of the university’s largest expansion in its history. The donation is the Taylors’ fourth gift to the institution, paving the way for 500 computer workspaces, 18 training and seminar rooms, 35 collaborative workrooms, additional video conference and distance learning facilities, among others. Driven by a passion for education, the Taylors have helped define the university and the city.
Jim Gurnett
Social Do-gooder
A video clip of Jim Gurnett speaking at an NDP housing rally in May didn’t even come close to going viral on YouTube.com, but nevertheless Gurnett made his point: “Homes for all. That’s all we want.” While many Albertans enjoy a standard of living envied by the rest of Canada, the executive director of the Edmonton Mennonite Centre for Newcomers has become a vocal advocate, fighting for social support for immigrants, refugees and low-income families. The former New Democrat MLA is also vice-chair of the Canadian Immigrant Sector Alliance and sits on the board of the Edmonton Chamber of Voluntary Organizations.
Michèle Stanners
Behind the Ruby Curtain
Alberta Ballet gave the province a groundbreaking gift in its 40th anniversary season: an innovative, world-premiere production of Dancing Joni, a collaboration between artistic director Jean-Grand-Maître and music legend Joni Mitchell. Behind the scenes, general director Michèle Stanners ensures that the company pushes its creative limits without ignoring the little details, such as budgets and deadlines. Her balanced approach is essential, and the results show onstage and in the boardroom.
Brad Stelfox
Environmental Futurist
A few years ago land-use ecologist Brad Stelfox developed an “Alberta Landscape Cumulative Effects Simulator” that projects current development trends into the future, 50 and 100 years hence. The resulting image is not a pretty picture, and consequently the independent consultant from Bragg Creek has become an oft-quoted voice of foresight and restraint in land- use conflicts from the Rocky Mountain foothills to the Athabasca oilsands.
Ed Stelmach
The Leader Next Door
Ed Stelmach is just a farmer from Lamont County – who happens to be Alberta’s premier. At least that was the storyline when he sneaked up the middle between favourites Jim Dinning and Ted Morton to win last December’s Tory leadership vote. Since then, he’s been quietly confirming that our post-Ralph province will be decidedly less bombastic. How firmly he holds the reins of our juggernaut economy remains to be seen.
Hank Swartout
Fundraising Power Player
As co-chair of the United Way of Calgary’s 2006 annual campaign, Hank Swartout, the recently retired executive chairman of Precision Drilling, oversaw the charitable organization’s annual fundraising drive, which kicked off in September. The drive brought in over $50 million, the largest amount ever raised in the organization’s 65-year history. The money will help children and youth, reduce poverty and support those living with disabilities.
Indira Samarasekera
Education Visionary
Since taking office in 2005, University of Alberta president Indira Samarasekera has focused on her goal of making the U of A one of the top 20 public universities in the world. The U of A continued to move closer to that goal during the academic year ending in 2006, securing funding for a science and technology centre that will have space for an additional 1,100 undergraduate and 478 graduate students, and increasing the university’s endowment through investment and gifts by $83 million, to a total of $640 million.
Larry Wall
Pitch Perfector
As executive director of Alberta’s Industrial Heartland Association, Larry Wall manages a region set to see an unprecedented industrial buildup over the next two decades.
The area, which spreads across the municipalities of Strathcona County, Sturgeon County, Lamont County and The City of Fort Saskatchewan, has garnered over $25 billion in proposed investments and 20,000 jobs from petroleum, petro-chemical and chemical industries. In response to the boom in oilsands production, Wall has perfected his sales skills, convincing four companies to build facilities in the area unofficially called “Upgrader Alley.”
Sheila Weatherill
Health-care Hero
As president and CEO Capital Health, Sheila Weatherill oversees the operation of Canada’s largest academic health region. The region employs 30,000 people and has a budget, at $2.4 billion, that’s larger than most private companies. Among her current priorities as the health authority’s head honcho is tackling obesity, which costs the provincial health-care system an estimated $320 million annually, and saving money by bridging the digital divide and making the health-care system more electronic.
Columba Yeung
Oilsands Innovator
Under the combined pressure of runaway building costs, emissions regulation, energy input costs and possibly rising royalties, current and would-be oilsands producers of all shapes and sizes are furiously trying to come up with a better way to draw the stubborn oil up out of the northern Alberta sand. The dark horse in this race is Value Creation Inc., founded and led by Hong Kong-born Columba Yeung. In March the privately held company announced plans for an in situ project budgeted at between $3.5 billion and $4 billion that would produce partially upgraded oil for an estimated $45,000 per flowing barrel, less than half the current industry benchmark. And this is on a property containing a 29-billion-barrel total resource.
Incredible? The University of Toronto-trained PhD in chemical engineering certainly has the chops, having helped design Shell Canada’s Scotford refinery and upgrader complex near Fort Saskatchewan and parent Royal Dutch Shell’s Nanhai refinery and petrochemical facility in China.
Much of the touted cost advantage of Value Creation’s Terre de Grace project, slated to start production in 2011, is based on something called colloidal physics, which the company says will cause the tiny colloids (contaminants suspended in the bitumen that tend to gum up refineries) to glom onto each other so that they can be stripped away at the wellhead, producing oil that can be pumped without the addition of diluent (light oil condensate). “One of the biggest cost problems with oilsands is that bitumen is not pumpable,” Yeung explains.
Value Creation is also the majority owner of BA Energy Inc., which is building the merchant-style Heartland upgrader near Fort Saskatchewan, due to start up next year. Whether either project lives up to Yeung’s projections remains to be seen. But one thing’s for sure: the industry is watching.
Grant Zawalsky
Deal Maker
A partner at Burnet, Duckworth & Palmer LLP, Calgary lawyer Grant Zawalsky is the Canadian record holder for completing the most income trust conversions in the oil industry. His double-digit deals, not in the millions but in the billions, include the $11-billion Penn West-Petrofund merger. In the lull of the federal government’s taxation of income trusts, Zawalsky has kept himself busy with his thriving mergers-and-acquisitions practice.
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