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/526329
july 2015 BCBusiness 135 vAncouver Sun; gerry kAhrmAnn/the province really that ideological; it's not really split left/ right," he says. "It's generally populist/cen- trist with a bias to free enterprise, which I would define as an economy in which small business is able to succeed without too big a burden of the state. Bill Bennett understood that the state has a legitimate role to provide the infrastructure that business needs to suc- ceed. Both Bennetts were very pragmatic in their thinking and less ideological." B read and circuses. The people who hated the notion of Expo and who fought against Vancouver's hosting of the 2010 Olympics fre- quently dismissed these public celebrations as distractions from the real and sometimes dire issues of the day. But Bud Smith, Grace McCarthy, Jimmy Pattison and many others interviewed for this piece all describe Bennett's view as something quite different. Expo, and the big infrastructure projects that went with it, were a post-recession focal point. After years of restraint—in fact during the most fractious years of government cutbacks—Bennett launched the province into a $300-million world's fair, commissioned Western Canada's first rapid transit line and began construction of an oft-promised, oft-delayed new highway to the Interior. In a way that W.A.C. Bennett would have admired, he was leveraging tax dollars to build the kind of infrastructure that he hoped would catalyze recovery. And put Vancouver on the world map. The linchpin—for Expo, as for Vancouver's future—was the land. The proposed site lay within a 207-acre parcel on the north shore of False Creek that was owned by Canadian Pacific and managed by CP's real estate arm, Marathon Realty, a company for which the future mayor and premier Gordon Campbell once worked as a young developer. "Marathon had been trying for 14 years to do something with that land," recalls Campbell, but no one could agree on a vision for the future of the site. Bennett broke the logjam. Whether he under- stood in the early '80s the full potential of the property, Bennett saw the opportunity of consol- idating the parcel in public hands, in the process securing a site for Expo and for BC Place (which Bennett hoped would jumpstart downtown rede- velopment). Marathon was soon convinced to swap the land for "Block 80," the property where the Wall Centre hotel now stands, and for a block of timber rights on Vancouver Island. That opened up the centrepiece and dove- tailed with some of Bennett's other plans for the fair. There was the first leg of what is now a regional SkyTrain sys- tem, the Expo Line, from New Westminster through Burnaby to the waterfront location of what would become the Canada Pavil- ion. And, dear to the heart of the Okanagan-born premier, there was the long-awaited Coquihalla Highway through Merritt to Kamloops. Bud Smith says the original rationale for the Coqui- halla was twofold. It was a way of sharing some of the wealth The linChpin— for expo, as for vanCouver's fuTure—was The land. The proposed siTe lay wiThin a 207-aCre parCel on The norTh shore of false CreeK ThaT was owned By Cana- dian paCifiC and managed By Cp's real esTaTe arm, maraThon realTy The world sTage Bill Bennett shows off Expo to Grace McCarthy (left) and Charles and Diana, the Prince and Princess of Wales (right)