With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
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MAY 2021 BCBUSINESS 11 COURTESY OF VANCITY G O F I G U R E SOURCES: BC FOOD HISTORY NETWORK; INNOVATION, SCIENCE AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT CANADA; STATISTICS CANADA; A&W CANADA; CONFERENCE BOARD OF CANADA; CANOE COLA; GLOBE AND MAIL; EXPATISTAN; CBC $544,792,000 B.C. manufacturing sales of soft drinks and ice in 2020 g 63.2% compared to 2015 Soft drinks make up 46% of calories consumed in Canada via non-alcoholic refreshment beverages Burnaby-based Canoe Cola attempted and discarded 80 cola recipes before launching its first, less-sweet product in 2018 $218,607.61 Final settlement reached last year in a B.C. Supreme Court class-action lawsuit against Canada Dry Motts alleging misleading claims that its ginger ale had health benefits from natural ginger $1,500 Actual sum going to each of the two lead plaintiffs, with the rest to the Law Foundation of B.C. As of late March, a 2-litre bottle of Coke went for 41¢ more in Victoria than the national average, according to cost-of- living estimator Expatistan Vancouver g 32¢ Kamloops g 6¢ Prince George g 2¢ Nanaimo g 1¢ $27 million Revenue (pre-pandemic) Victoria expected to raise from B.C.'s new soda tax in its first year ( the informer ) F I V E Q U E ST ION S 5. LOOKING AHEAD, WHAT ARE YOU MOST EXCITED ABOUT? Our climate work and the innovation it will bring about. The other one would be our priority around supporting a fair recovery from COVID. Local businesses are a backbone of our community, and many of them have been hit hard. We want to continue to drive local recovery, and we've been thinking about new programs and how else we can do that. And then for me, it's how do we partner, how do we innovate, and how do we leverage the full Vancity group to do more in our community and to help where we operate to thrive? That's what gets me up in the morning. • 1 How has COVID-19 impacted Vancity? When the pandemic hit, we knew that we had to take a lot of our capital reserves and put them where they would do the most good. And that was in the hands of our members: everyday people, small- and medium-sized businesses, not- for-profits, social enterprises that operate in our community. We made less in 2020 than we would have without COVID, but we put money into a vari- ety of programs, and that was at the centre of our response. 2 How have Vancity members coped with the pan- demic? What kind of year do you think 2021 will be for B.C. families and businesses? We did a couple of studies in the fall, looking at small busi- ness. We found that the busi- nesses that were doing better in the first part of our research were really connected to their community. We're paying attention to real estate—surging prices and the effects on affordability. And capital markets: we've seen a huge flow of funds to socially responsible investments. But also, capital markets have been fairly buoyant, and there's a lot of noise. So we're paying atten- tion to that to see how it will start affecting our members. 3 With one of five climate change pledges, Vancity is the first Canadian bank or credit union to commit to net-zero carbon emissions across its lending portfolio. Why did you do that? For us, it was stepping back and thinking, OK, we're a fi- nancial institution, so we have certain levers that we can pull. They're quite different levers than other businesses'. Our op- erations matter, but they aren't the biggest issue. The biggest one is, what do we finance? And so when we looked at our portfolio, we were trying to think about how we make the biggest difference. That's where our net-zero commitment came CHRISTINE BERGERON After taking over during the pandemic, the president and CEO of Vancity brings entrepreneurial leadership to Canada's largest community credit union by Nick Rockel in. Our perspective has been that the climate emergency is at the doorstep, and it requires immediate action to transition to a clean economy. And a re- covering economy post-COVID needs to be one that's also reducing emissions. 4 You used to work at an early-stage venture capital firm and a hedge fund. How has that experience informed your current role? I was involved in building both firms, one as a co-founder and one as the first team member hired. When you're involved at that stage, it gives you breadth of roles. You need to be able to start from nothing and take a blank piece of paper and build. So I'm quite entrepreneurial —probably an entrepreneur at heart—and I bring that to how I lead and think. I also taught venture capital and did micro-finance work. I worked with a lot of startups and tech incubators prior to the 2008 crash. And so I have a pretty deep understanding of finance, from private equity to growth capital, lending, public markets, wealth management. When you understand traditional constructs, you can also think about how to change them. The way we cur- rently define success around risk and return is limiting. It doesn't have a value lens; it doesn't have an impact lens.