The Power 50: Our 6th annual ranking of Vancouver's most powerful people

Meet Vancouver's players. Who’s really running City Hall? Who’s the godfather on our waterfront? Who keeps our symphony and opera afloat? Who’s got the connections to get things done quickly? And why is a man in Washington, D.C., one of this city’s 10 most powerful people?

By Tyee Bridge, Steve Burgess, Marcie Good, Michael Harris, Rob Hawatson, Jonathan Lin, Alexis Roohani, Masaji Takei and the Editors

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50. Terry McBride *New
CEO / Nettwerk Music Group

Sam Feldman (No. 46) may have helped create Canada’s music biz, but Terry McBride is intent on knocking it down for a re-build. The 47-year-old chart broker, who co-founded Nettwerk in 1984 and today manages such iPod juggernauts as Sarah McLachlan and Avril Lavigne, is spearheading a not-so quiet revolution in his digitally besieged industry. He wants to legalize file-sharing and earlier this year he sparked a music industry uproar when he announced he would pay the lawyer’s fees for a Texas man being sued for piracy by the Recording Industry Association of America. McBride also believes in giving artists control over their own intellectual property—a repulsive thought for major record labels accustomed to pocketing half the retail price of a CD and slicing off only a buck or two per unit for the band. And then there was his marketing stunt for the latest Barenaked Ladies album: instrument and vocal tracks sold separately so fans can mix their own song versions. Crazy genius, or just crazy? Stay iTuned.

What’s your No. 1 priority in 2007?
Avril’s album, which is due out in April. We’re creating a whole manga story around it that will screen on Japanese cellphones.

What was your personal lowlight from the past year?
Not much sleep. And I guess it doesn’t help that I signed up for our office’s 40-day yoga challenge.

What’s your biggest stress-inducer?
Vocalists who lose their voices a week before the big tour.

49. Joe Houssian *Down
Chairman and CEO / Intrawest

As of press time, Joe Houssian is still with Intrawest—still chairman and CEO of one of the world’s largest resort companies, and still King of the Hill (Whistler Blackcomb, Intrawest’s marquee property). But the company Houssian founded in 1976 as a residential/commercial real estate venture, and which gradually morphed into a mountain resort behemoth (with annual revenues topping $1.7 billion, and properties that include Quebec’s Tremblant, Ontario’s Blue Mountain and Alberta’s Panorama), is no longer his: in October, shareholders approved a $2.76 billion (U.S.) takeover bid by New York-based Fortress Investment Group. Houssian, 57, pocketed an estimated $126 million (U.S.) from the sale. Freedom 57, anyone?

48. John Furlong *Down
CEO / Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games

Poor John Furlong. He’s a corporate chairman, but it’s a corporation quite unlike Alcan or Sierra Systems. It’s under constant, intense media scrutiny. It grows more unwieldy by the month, a rapidly burgeoning conglomeration of employees, suppliers, sponsors and volunteers. It depends on a clock’s-ticking, can-do, rah-rah spirit, but like Cinderella at the ball it’s dancing toward a predetermined conclusion. Though cost overruns seem inevitable in a robust economy that has brought intense competition for materials and labour, the media delight in running headlines about out-of-control spending and long-term hangovers. Lately there have also been suggestions that Furlong’s personal life has affected the team’s esprit de corps. According to VANOC’s annual report released in October, though, it’s all good: venue construction is on budget, and sponsorship and licensing revenues are on target. You’re playing with the numbers, say the critics. On the contrary, says VANOC. In the end, of course, it will all depend on two critical weeks in 2010: the way the world views Vancouver, and the way John Furlong goes down in the city’s history.

47. Larry Beasley *Down
Former City Planner; Professor of Planning / UBC School of Community and Regional Planning

Early into his retirement from the city, Larry Beasley says he has more invitations than he knows what to do with. It’s no wonder, given his reputation for having promoted and made famous “the Vancouver model” and “Vancouverism” around the world. As livable as our mixed-use, high-density, park-enhanced, skinny-towered downtown has proven, Beasley is tired of hearing those words cropping up in places like Toronto, San Francisco and even Dubai. “It’s not just a question of importing the Vancouver approach; in fact, it’s very important that we don’t do that,” he says. “Part of the fascination for me is how things need to be different in other places.” That will be the challenge with one of his more recent commissions—overseeing a new design for the United Arab Emirates city of Abu Dhabi. Closer to home, Beasley will form a new company in co-operation with condo marketer Bob Rennie (No. 8) in the new year, doing planning and development work.

What’s your No. 1 priority in 2007?
To start engaging in urbanist challenges around the world.

Which leader do you most respect?
[Urban critic] Jane Jacobs. Her theories and ideas were very influential in my development and my practice, so I’m going to miss her.

If you had the power to change one thing about Vancouver, what would it be?
I would have much more housing at an affordable level for all our citizens; I would not have a situation where a young family felt they had to go to the edge of our region in order to find a place to live.

46. Sam Feldman *New
CEO / S.L. Feldman & Associates

The man with oracle ears has heard the future and it is a young Ben Folds-meets-Billy Joel pianist from Anderson, Indiana, named Jon McLaughlin. At least that’s what the aggressive talent scouts at S.L. Feldman & Associates, Canada’s largest full-service entertainment agency, are telling its founder. Feldman—whose fame factory includes a tour booking division, a film and TV production company run by his wife Janet York (Big Pictures), a film and TV talent agency (Characters) and a sister talent company run by long-time partner Bruce Allen—created Watchdog Entertainment in 2003 to develop the next generation of contemporary and alternative musicians. The junior beat seekers promptly signed Abbotsford rockers Hedley, who went maple leaf platinum last year, and they continue to troll north and south of the border in hopes of adding more big fish to the star pool (which Feldman co-manages with Steve Macklam). Giants in that pond include Diana Krall, The Chieftains and Jesse Cook.

What’s your No. 1 priority in 2007?
Aside from new records coming out from our clients Norah Jones, Joni Mitchell, Elvis Costello and Ry Cooder, I’d say it’s going to be producing a second season of Whistler for CTV.

What was your personal highlight from the past year?
Developing a strategic alliance with the William Morris Agency so that we can trade a significant amount of talent back and forth.

What’s the one thing you feel absolutely powerless over?
Geopolitics. The evening news is starting to look like a bad outtake from Team America: World Police.

45. Thomas Fung *Up
CEO / Fairchild Group

Thomas Fung runs a business empire with multiple interests: Chinese-language television and radio stations, real estate development, retail and pharmaceuticals. But he’s not the stereotypical all-powerful, unapproachable man-at-the-top: when he read his Power List entry last year that criticized his Aberdeen Mall’s lack of direction, he took careful note. “That helped me give second thought,” he says. His revitalization plan includes adding more brand-name tenants from Asia and increasing direct sourcing to offer wholesale prices in his own stores. The next part of his strategy is to expand the mall with a new wing, this one featuring North American stores. The revamped mall (“where East meets West”) only stands to gain from his on-site condominium development now under construction and the future Canada Line station to be named Aberdeen.

Which leader do you most respect?
Jim Pattison. Last month he came to my house—he’s a man of charisma and intelligence, and he gave me a lot of advice. In many ways he resembles my late father. They both started their businesses from scratch, they struggled—and they went all the way to the top.

Who do you bounce ideas off?
At times, I talk to my rivals. We see each other and even send gifts to each other at Christmas. I listen to their suggestions. But those suggestions are for the things I shouldn’t do.

What’s your best stress-reliever?
I love to write. [Fung’s film, The Paper Moon Affair, was nominated for five Leo Awards this year.] I’m planning to do a medium-budget film and I wrote the script again. It’s an action film but without violence. And a love drama.

44. Rob Feenie *New
Lumière Chef & Partner

When he won the Iron Chef competition in early 2005, Rob Feenie became something more than a celebrity chef: he became a brand. Ever since, he and his partners David and Manjy Sidoo have been marketing the brand to spectacular effect. Operating out of his flagship rooms on Broadway, Lumiere and Feenie’s, the Burnaby-born chef has turned up in everything from White Spot commercials to Harmony Airways ads (he oversees the menu in business class—see David Ho, No. 40) to Red Bull billionaire Dietrich Mateschitz’s foodie bash in Vienna. Like Umberto Menghi in his Vancouver heyday, or Wolfgang Puck in Los Angeles, the 41-year-old Feenie is a tireless promoter as well as a brilliantly inventive and committed restaurateur. In the spring he’ll join the likes of Tiger Woods and Kate Winslet as the subject of a “My Life. My Card” American Express campaign. He and his partners are negotiating with Galen Weston Jr. to run the restaurant atop the expanded Holt Renfrew at the Pacific Centre, and there’s talk of a restaurant in Toronto. And in Feenie’s spare time? He’s working on a new cookbook, his fourth. Some Red Bull just might come in handy.

Who do you bounce ideas off?
My friend Jim Poris at Food Arts in New York. He has a great understanding of trends in this business and I check in with him on a weekly basis.

What was your personal lowlight from the past year?
Turns out I’ve got a rare muscular disorder in my legs caused by all the cycling I do, and it really got me down. But I’ve been on the comeback trail for the last few months.

If you had the power to change one thing about Vancouver, what would it be?
The food journalists.

43. Frank Giustra *New
Chairman / Endeavour Financial; Director / Radcliffe Foundation

The last time this son of a Sudbury nickel miner graced the Power 50 was in 2002, when he was still chairman of Lions Gate Entertainment—the Hollywood North studios he founded in 1997. Giustra could afford a six-year foray into film because of his success at Yorkton Securities in the early ’90s, where he helped raise $3 billion in equity for the resource sector during his 10-year reign at the helm. In 2001, even as he chased Oscar gold with Lions Gate, he began buying up gold mines as the chair of Vancouver-based Endeavour Financial. The merchant banker bought a $20-million shell company called Wheaton River and within a four-year span, thanks to his spot-on prediction of rising gold prices, built it into a $2.4-billion operation, which merged last year with Goldcorp (see Ian Telfer, No. 12) to form a $5-billion bullion behemoth. Hence the 49-year-old’s 12,000-square-foot, chateau-like waterfront home—said to be a serious contender for the most expensive residence in West Vancouver—where he lives with his wife of seven years, Uganda Rising-documentary producer Alison Lawton. Giustra is also a veritable Friend of Bill: he co-produced, along with Sam Feldman, a 60th Birthday Gala Fundraiser for former U.S. President Clinton in September. The event—featuring entertainment from the likes of Jon Bon Jovi, James Taylor and Billy Crystal—raised over $21 million from 650 well-heeled guests for the charitable William J. Clinton Foundation. “All of my chips, almost, are on Bill Clinton,” said Giustra in a recent New Yorker article. “He’s a brand, a worldwide brand, and he can do things and ask for things that no one else can.”

42. Andrea Southcott *New
President / TBWA Vancouver

As head of Vancouver’s third largest ad agency and the only woman president, TBWA chief Andrea Southcott says that “having the confidence to get things done” is her secret to success. This year she added 1-800-GOT-JUNK and Pharmasave to a client roster that includes heavies such as B.C. Lotteries, Vancity and the B.C Government. But it’s that last client—the government—that got TBWA plenty of media play this fall, attention it didn’t ask or pay for. Southcott’s personal ties to the B.C. Liberals—she sat on their 2005 re-election committee—were called into question by the NDP when TBWA was awarded a $150,000 contract to execute an anti-smoking campaign, even though the firm had already been named the Ministry of Health’s agency of record. The smoke has since cleared. “We’re so scrupulous and ethical,” says Southcott about the controversy, “so it’s frustrating when that kind of stuff is out there just for the sake of political football.”

Which leader do you most respect?
Dennis Skulsky [former Sun and Province publisher] for his community work and ability to build and motivate great teams.

What was your personal highlight from the past year?
Helping dispel Vancouver’s “no fun” reputation during Grey Cup 2005.

If you had the power to change one thing about Vancouver, what would it be?
Vancouver is doing innovative, world-leading work in so many areas. I want to get those stories told.

41. Coreen Mayrs (left) & Heike Brandstatter *New
Partners / Coreen Mayrs Casting Inc.

If you’re one of the 10,000 struggling actors in Vancouver, few people hold as much sway in your life as Coreen Mayrs and Heike Brandstatter. As casting directors for many of the big features and episodic TV shows that come through town—recent shows include Snakes on a Plane and X-Men 3, as well as Smallville, Fantastic Four and Battlestar Galactica—they make the initial call on which actors north of the 49th will receive any further consideration from producers and directors. By their reckoning there’s actually more opportunity per capita for actors here than in La-La-land. Casting for up to six shows at once can bring 1,000 actors through their offices every week; four seasons of one show they cast provides over 2,000 actors with speaking parts. Their advice to up-and-comers: persevere.

What’s your No. 1 priority in 2007?
Heike: Simplify, simplify, simplify...feel the wind, smell the flowers, listen, give back.
Coreen: To spend at least my weekends living off the grid.

What was your personal highlight from the past year?
Heike: I slept under the stars.
Coreen: My mum, who was an adopted only child, finding her birth family at 66 years of age.

If you had the power to change one thing about Vancouver, what would it be?
Heike: I love architecture and I’d love to have the power to influence how the face of the city develops.
Coreen: Vancouver Specials wouldn’t exist.

CONTINUE