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/508767
sue Paish (a) CeO, lifelabs Medical laboratory services influenCe: as head of the country's largest com- munity-based laboratory services company, Paish leads an organization on the leading edge of private medicine–delivering more than 100 million lab tests annually to almost 20 million patients in ontario and B.C. faCtOid: Prior to enter- ing the health field, Paish was managing partner of fasken Martineau DuMou- lin llP in B.C., where she helped the law firm grow from one office to nine on three continents. Mary ackenhusen (b) President and CeO, Vancouver Coastal health influenCe: VCh is the larg- est academic and tertiary health authority in B.C., serving a population of one million with a budget of $3 billion. ackenhusen has put a personal face on the bureaucratic beast through regular blog- ging and opening lines of communication between patients, employees and members of the public. faCtOid: VCh's 14,300 full- and part-time staff include 4,400 nurses, 2,100 physi- cians and 3,000 volunteers. amiee Chan (c) President and CeO, norsat Interna- tional Inc. influenCe: Chan is a rare female voice in B.C.'s tech sec- tor–and a turnaround artist extraordinaire (more on that in "The Great Turnaround," p.24) who took nor- sat from near bank- ruptcy to become a leading provider of telecommunica- tions services, with customers ranging from naTo to Boeing to fox news. faCtOid: The hong Kong native joined norsat as a co-op engineering student in 1989. shannon rogers (d) President and general counsel, Global relay influenCe: regularly listed as one of Canada's top women entrepreneurs, rogers leads a popular cloud-based message archiving and compliance services firm that counts as clients banks, hedge funds and other blue chip companies for whom secure information is paramount. faCtOid: Global relay has 22 of the world's 25 largest banks on its customer rolls. Karimah es sabar (e) President and CeO, The Centre for Drug research and Develop- ment (CDrD) influenCe: es sabar is one of the leading forces in Canada's life sciences sector, helming life sciences BC through a period of transformative growth between 2005 and 2010–and now CDrD, a national not-for-profit drug development and commer- cialization centre that's bridging the gap between early-stage academic research and industry. faCtOid: The Kenya native and trained neurochemist first came to Canada in 1988 to work for Connaught labs, where she received this country's Gold award for Business excellence ( CaBe). Barbara Grantham (f) President and CeO, VGh and UBC hospital foundation influenCe: at a time of tightening public finances and increasing public need, hospitals need top- notch fundraisers–and Grantham, a former top executive at the Canadian Mental health association, Children's hospital and the Vancouver foundation, is one of the best. faCtOid: The annual VGh Millionaire lottery has, over its 19-year run, raised $60 million to buy medical equipment for the hospi- tal's three facilities. Cybele negris (g) President, CeO and co-founder, Webnames.ca Inc. influenCe: as Canada's original ".ca" registrar, spun off from UBC, Web- names.ca remains one of the country's leading providers of web hosting and other Internet solu- tions–and negris, at its helm, one of B.C.'s top tech voices. faCtOid: Webnames .ca now also sells other domain extensions, includ- ing .bike, .clothing and .guru. June 2015 BCBusiness 37 bcbusiness.ca eos for internal and promotional use. Her in€uence can increasingly be seen far beyond the reaches of Canada's third- largest telco. In late 2014, Mercier was asked by Kellie Leitch, minister of labour and minister responsible for the status of women, to join her advisory group of leaders on women in the economy. She has also served on various boards and foundations, including currently the boards of the Canadian Cancer Research Society and Stornoway Diamond Cor- poration, and has received numerous awards: Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubi- lee Medal, Women's Executive Network Top 100 Most Powerful Women in Can- ada (2012, 2013 and 2014), 2013 Lexpert Zenith Award (celebrating women lead- ers in the legal profession) and the 2013 Western Canada General Counsel Award. —Felicity Stone (a) (b) (c) (d) (e) (f) (g) He altH+tecHnology