P U B L IC S E R V IC E
Brenda Leong
CHAIR AND CEO, BRITISH COLUMBIA SECURITIES
COMMISSION
It was the early 1980s, and Brenda Leong
was conf licted. A couple of years after
graduating with a business degree from the
University of Alberta, the native Calgarian
had a job as a customer service representa-
tive at Bank of Nova Scotia. She enjoyed the
€eld and had inherited her serial entrepre-
neur father, Carl's, love of capital markets,
but something didn't seem right.
"When I re…ect back now, one of the rea-
sons I didn't stay [in €nance] and decided
to pursue law was that I looked up into the
executive level of the bank and saw that
there were no women," the aŠable but seri-
ous
BCSC head says.
So it was oŠ to the Osgoode Hall Law
School at York University in Toronto. Leong
spent about 15 years practising corporate
law in Vancouver, but she never stopped
dreaming of a career in the €nancial sector.
She did a brief stint in the '90s at her current
workplace, but the watchdog was "going
through some operational changes," she
says, prompting her to return to law.
In 2004, though, she was lured back,
becoming executive director of the
BCSC
before being appointed chair and
CEO €ve
years later. She was recently named to a
third —ive-year term with the regulator,
slated to end in 2023.
Although €nance has made great strides
toward gender equality, Leong says, it still
B . C .' S MO S T
I N F LU E N T I A L WOM E N
34 BCBUSINESS MARCH 2019
