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In politics, William Richard Bennett never lost a fight—neither the lowliest nomination tussle nor the big- gest, most belligerent battle with what seemed, in the early 1980s, to be the whole B.C. labour movement (backed up by pretty much every civil society organization in the province). At the polls, Premier Bill Bennett's winning streak consisted of three of the five biggest pluralities in B.C. history. And between elections, he modernized the civil service, defeated the deficit, hyper-charged the economy and built an infrastructure legacy that transformed the face (and the interna- tional reputation) of British Columbia and, especially, its biggest city. Then, at the height of his power, Bennett resigned—in the process bleeding off so much of the anger and resentment that collects at the feet of any long- serving government that he cleared the path for a fourth consecutive win for his Social Credit party. It's the kind of record that would have made any other leader a beloved elder statesman, in constant demand as a speaker—perhaps as a co-author on books about policy and political strategy. But Bennett, who, at age 82, is now lost to the cruel ravages of Alzheimer's disease, ended his public life in ignominy, one of the principals in a tawdry insider-trading case that dragged through the courts for eight humiliating years. In the process, people seemed to forget what historian David Mitchell calls "that remarkable decade that was so for- mative for B.C." Perhaps nothing was so formative—or left as lasting a legacy— as Expo 86. In the late 1970s, Vancouver was a provincial lumber town wrapped loosely around a smelly slough. The north shore of False Creek was an industrial slum, with beehive burners belching smoke into the downtown and an abandoned B.C. Electric coal gasification plant oozing toxins into False Creek. Today, that creek is one of the prettiest urban inlets on the planet, and the former Expo site is ground zero for a style of city living that the world now admires as "Vancouverism." Expo was the tipping point in Vancouver's emergence as one of the world's most livable cities, and Bennett was instrumental in making it all happen—even if his first instinct was to reject the world's fair out of hand. It was Grace McCarthy, then the provincial tourism minis- ter, who brought the idea to Bennett in late 1979, arguing that it would be a wonderful way to celebrate B.C.'s centennial. "Bill said to me, 'Grace, we have so much on our plate and no money in the treasury. I don't think we could possibly take on anything as massive as a world's fair,'" recalls the now 87-year-old. "And I said, 'It's not until 1986—that's seven years from now. If we can't get the province on track in seven years, then we don't deserve to be in government.'" Never one to back down from a challenge, or to stick too long to a losing position, Bennett got on board. Expo's subsequent success—like much of Bennett's career— seemed somehow both impossible and inevitable. He was forever beginning as the wrong guy in the wrong time, join- ing a battle that appeared lost from the start. He worked with 130 BCBusiness july 2015 WilliAm eAdington grAhAm/city of vAncouver ArchiveS