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ASSOCIATION
David Collyer
Reputation Remediator
Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers president David Collyer doesn’t shy away from taking some responsibility for the reckless reputation currently, and globally, ascribed to Alberta’s oilsands industry. But since joining CAPP last September, the former Shell Canada boss has endeavoured to rebrand the sands as a nature-conscious enterprise by way of websites, newsprint and TV, all without resorting to shots of healthy, young ducks frolicking on English beaches.

BUSINESS
John Cormier
Breathtaking Enterpriser
Picomole Instruments Inc. founder and CEO John Cormier is proving that not only can you diagnose disease from a breath sample but that Edmonton’s a good place for a high-tech startup built around the idea. After winning the TEC Venture Prize in 2007, Picomole took BioAlberta’s 2008 Emerging Company of the Year award soon after completing a prototype of its flagship product LifeSens, the portable, breathalyzer-type device designed to quickly and painlessly reveal what ails ya.

BUSINESS
Venance Côté
The Entrepreneur
Announced in late October, Ven Côté was named Ernst & Young’s Prairie Entrepreneur of the Year 2008. He is president and CEO of Edmonton-based ZCL Composites Inc., which he purchased in 1987, and has led ZCL to become the largest manufacturer of underground fibreglass tanks in North America.

BUSINESS
Christian Darbyshire and Andy McCreath
Event Promoters
Since sketching out their plan for a speaking event company on a napkin five years ago, Andy McCreath and Christian Darbyshire have steadily established Calgary’s place on the international public-speaking circuit, bringing orators of ever-greater renown to the city. Still, what they pulled off on March 17 counts as a coup: bringing George W. Bush to Cowtown for his very first speech since stepping down as president of the United States. Attendees who paid $400 a seat didn’t much mind waiting for hours outside in the cold to get through the security checkpoint for what they knew was a historic event.

“Every single person who came into that room was patted down,” recalls Darbyshire, who says that speech involved a whole new level of security than what their company, tinePublic Inc., had been used to with guests such as Bill Clinton, Rudolph Giuliani and Tony Blair. It doesn’t matter who’s footing the bill; when dealing with the U.S. Secret Service, Darbyshire says, “We take direction from them.”

McCreath, 33, and Darbyshire, 34, now put on speaking engagements all across Canada – Dubya was back in Toronto May 29 opposite Bill Clinton – but thanks to them, Calgary tends to take the cake. “Calgary is our hometown. We love to do things here first,” Darbyshire says. And the level of public-policy and leadership discourse in the city is richer for it.

In between speaking dates, tinePublic keeps busy as a public relations agency for oil and gas, mining, finance and cosmetics companies. Still, the partners’ day jobs can’t compare with spending two hours dining with Bush in a private room at Osteria de Medici in Kensington, flying on chartered planes with Clinton and Giuliani or shooting the breeze with Tony Blair. Some of that greatness has to rub off.

“Colin Powell of all of them was a very charming man. You can see why a man like that was a leader of men,” Darbyshire says. – Michael McCullough

BUSINESS
Peter Edgar and Guy Scott
Recession-Defiant Developers
The founding partners of WAM Development Group have kept a pretty low profile since starting what stood for Western Asset Management in 1987. But their latest project, to build a $3-billion retail, office, industrial and residential complex in northeast Calgary called StoneGate Landing (in partnership with AIMCo), can’t help but stand out when most other property developers have gone to ground. The first phase opens this fall, with full build-out planned for 2016.