Ten People to Know | A roundup of top business, education and political leaders from Saskatchewan
Doing business in Saskatchewan? Meet the people who are shaping the province’s economic future today
by Allan Casey
Photography by Nayan Sthankiya
Depesh Parmar
Vice-President, Marketing, Picatic E-Ticket Inc.
Word of mouth has won him Saskatchewan, but can shoestring viral marketing and a great product win him the world? Along with his brother Jayesh, Depesh Parmar founded Picatic.com, a free online portal where event promoters can manage attendance at their trade shows, lectures or workshops – including ticket sales. Promoters can add events for free; Picatic takes a small cut only when a ticket gets sold. “Our margins are very low, so we have to grow beyond Saskatchewan,” says Depesh. Reasons for optimism? Besides a catchy name and elegantly simple interface, Picatic targets a practically unlimited market that predatory sports and concert ticket sellers (you know who we mean) ignore.
William J. Doyle
President And CEO, Potashcorp
Bill Doyle had the lid blown off his customary low profile in 2008 when he was widely reported to be Canada’s highest-paid corporate chieftain (salary plus options: $320 million, according to the methodology of the Financial Post Magazine’s CEO Scorecard). Doyle’s pay packet has since returned to earth along with the spot price of the commodity that was the pink darling of Bay Street for a while. The company earned almost $1 billion in 2009 – third-best ever – though this was off 70% from the previous year and the celebration therefore muted. Whenever prices trend downward, Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan Inc. (rebranded as PotashCorp) and its lesser Saskatchewan mining brethren, which sell potash jointly under the Canpotex brand, simply dial back production and hunker down. Saskatchewan and Russian potash mines constitute the bulk of global reserves, and the two players have been likewise OPEC-ing the commodity’s price for years. With a major new company digging into the Canadian prairies (see Gordon Graham, BHP Billiton), and with PotashCorp et al. spending significantly to ramp up production capacity to meet the demand peaks, the supply end of the market seems to be opening up at last.
Donald J. Atchison
Mayor, City of Saskatoon
As the third-term municipal leader of Saskatoon never tires of pointing out in speeches, the provincial business capital is itself one of the nation’s hottest ventures. Headquarters to mining, machining, agricultural services and many flavours of technology, the city is a consistently list-topping, highly diversified urban economy. Don Atchison sits Buddha-like under a bubble of economic blue sky he did not create. Whether history credits him with capitalizing on the windfall to modernize his city remains to be seen.
The current run of good times aside, Saskatoon remains a quiet prairie burg with a century-long tradition of exporting its young people over the horizon. To compete for the best and brightest in a more typical economic climate, a small city needs to be not just good, but great. The mayor curries favour with the more progressive elements of the urban community – like when he turned up at a standing-room-only lecture series by visiting urban renewalist Jan Gehl, whose municipal makeover clients include Copenhagen, New York and Melbourne. Even so, Atchison continues to build freeways, suburbs, and an urban transit network on 1960s principles. The cost of entry-level housing keeps pace with Vancouver – the municipal perks rather lag – giving a young, mobile workforce plenty to think about in the dead of winter. Even his legacy River Landing project remains in a planning bog after many years.
Atchison continues to oversee one of the greatest urban expansions in provincial history. Whether the boom will yield an attractive, modern, efficient city retooled for business in the next century or Calgary circa 1985, Don Atchison will get the credit.
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