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.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/394777
bcbusiNess.ca November 2014 BCBusiness 49 whole bunch of money." The key to that early success, he says, was "understanding how to market yourself and your business. I had to learn a lot about marketing—and I had a knack for it, which I brought into politics. I real- ized that if you have a story to tell people that resonates with them, you're going to connect with them in a way that they're probably going to buy from you." As Bennett approached his 40th birthday, he felt it was time for the next chapter. After selling the resort, he returned to Campbellford and helped raise his two young sons while Beth ran a local dress shop. He also enrolled in law school at Queen's, in Kingston. When he graduated, three years later, the Bennetts moved again, this time out west. He had a close friend in Cran- brook, a doctor he'd played hockey with, who sold him on life in the East Kootenays. But the other reason for his choice was practical. "I did an analysis of all the towns and cities in Canada that I'd consider living in, and I got all the Canadian Bar Asso- ciation information and Law Society information and made a comparison of lawyers per 1,000 population in all these communities. Cranbrook was under-lawyered." He practised law from 1994 until he got elected for the Liberals in 2001. t's the analytical side of Ben net t—t he nu mber- cruncher, the problem- solver—that Christy Clark has called upon in her fi rst full mandate, putting the entrepreneur-cum-lawyer in charge of complex and politically challenging fi les. Bennett relishes tak- ing on the unpopular fi les and seeing them through because "it's the right thing to do." It's why he went catch- and-release at his fi shing lodge in the late '70s, when nobody else was doing it. "All my competitors said, 'If you don't let people keep all the fi sh they catch, they'll never come back.'" But they did, and by instituting strict conservation standards, Bennett built a reputation for top-notch fi shing at Nueltin. That same determination—his critics would say stubbornness—lies behind his biggest win since being re-elected in 2013: overhauling the Agricultural Land Reserve ( ALR) and the commis- sion that governs it, the Agricultural Land Commission (ALC). Bill 24, which introduced those changes, created two zones across the province: Zone 1, com- prising Vancouver Island, the South Coast and Okanagan regions, keeps the status-quo imperative of protect- ing agricultural land. Zone 2, compris- ing the Interior, Kootenay and North regions, now allows for consideration of non-agricultural uses on what's gener- ally considered less desirable farmland. "I have to be careful what I say, because it was a cabinet process, but the two zones was not our fi rst choice," Bennett admits. "Our fi rst choice was to make the changes to how decisions are made and allow more fl exibility—the way we did in Zone 2—across the whole province." Ironically, that's what the B.C. Agriculture Council also wanted. "That's what they asked us for. We didn't do that because the MLAs from urban B.C. were afraid." By Bennett's account, many urban caucus members—"MLAs who have zero agriculture, fl ower pots outside the windowsills of their apart- ment buildings maybe"—didn't want to face left-leaning voters with a proposal to take land out of the ALR, no matter its agricultural value. "So we decided it was better to limit these changes to areas where it would be more accept- able to the people who lived there." Critics, including NDP leader John Horgan, say Bennett is trying to �ix something that isn't broken—and didn't bother to consult with anyone before making the biggest changes to the ALR since its creation in 1973. "In my expe- rience in public policymaking," says Horgan, "you usually have to identify a failing, get the public to understand that there's a failing, and then provide a solution. Mr. Bennett went straight from 'I think there's a problem' to 'Here's my solution—and I'm not even going to talk to people about it.' I think his haste was the challenge here. If there was a problem, the Liberals did not articulate it eff ectively. And then they rammed it through—because they had the power to do so." Bennett makes no apologies. "There are times when, if you really believe I