News and Features
Power Broker
By John Cathro and Paul Webster published Oct 1, 2009
Additional Images click to enlarge
As head of the B.C. Transmission Corporation, David Emerson will be a key architect of the city's (and the province's) economic future
For David Emerson, the past year has been a wild ride. At the Beijing Olympics in 2008, he was Canada’s top representative. Back in Ottawa, he was the country’s minister of foreign affairs (and B.C.’s top Tory). Then, in September of last year, Prime Minister Stephen Harper called a snap election and the one man who could claim to be a close confidant of both Harper and B.C. premier Gordon Campbell was out of a job. But instead of a hard landing, Emerson got a phone call from Campbell. And with that call came a new job, a handsome salary, a superbly scenic office, and a position as a key architect of British Columbia’s economic future.
“I thought I’d take a break from everything,” Emerson said earlier this year about his decision not to fight for the Vancouver-Kingsway seat he won for the Liberals in 2006 and then handed to the Tories the next day. “But after two weeks, my wife got tired of me around the house,” he said with a grin. “Gordon Campbell, who I’ve known for a long time, paid me a few visits on the weekends and we started to talk about a couple of things that he really wanted.” The first thing Campbell wanted was a volunteer chairman for his Premier’s Economic Council. He also needed someone to head up the British Columbia Transmission Corporation, the Crown-owned company that builds and operates electrical transmission lines in the province. “All the stars aligned,” Emerson explained. “There’s probably no more critical piece to a North American environment and energy strategy than the transmission system.”
The only hitch, from Emerson’s perspective, was the job itself. It’s important, it’s powerful, it’s prestigious, but it’s a long way from spearheading big-ticket international diplomatic strategies like Canada’s Asia Pacific Gateway Project, which he did in Ottawa. “I have to confess that I have always hated transmission lines,” Emerson said, silhouetted against the scenic backdrop of an office window through which, on a clear day, you can discern a wisplike trace of BCTC transmission lines snaking in from the Interior to feed Vancouver. However necessary, Emerson said bluntly, transmission lines are a “blight on the landscape.”
To make matters worse, in mid February, just months after he took the job, BCTC was publicly horsewhipped in B.C.’s top court for trampling First Nations rights while charging ahead on a huge project to rescue Vancouver from an energy crunch planners have been warning about for years. So, instead of settling into a plush sinecure, Emerson found himself at the centre of a high-voltage fight in which the stakes may be nothing less than the survival of the B.C. economy as we know it. “I consider myself philosophically Buddhist,” Emerson mentioned. Having now been reincarnated at BCTC, he’ll need all the good karma he can muster.
