Brennan Clarke

Congratulations to Norman Keevil, CEO and chair, Teck Resources Ltd., and 2012 Pacific Region Entrepreneur of the Year for Lifetime Achievement. Considering his father’s standing as an esteemed professor of geophysics at the University of Toronto, it’s no surprise that Teck Resources chair Norman Keevil started learning about rock formations and mineral deposits at an early age.

When Ashley Cooper was studying commerce at UBC in the 1980s, he made ends meet working at Paladin Security, a small business his brother Hugh had founded in 1976 as a sideline to his career as a stockbroker. When he...

Congratulations to John Tilstra, CEO of Centra Construction Group Ltd., the 2011 Pacific Region Entrepreneur of the Year in Real Estate and Construction. You might say that John Tilstra saw a window of opportunity open up when BC Hydro launched its PowerSmart program back in 1989. Running a small construction firm specializing in exterior cladding at the time, Tilstra knew there was money to be made in the energy retrofit work being created by Hydro’s new program of power-saving incentives.

A seagull’s cry echoes across the sparkling waters of Victoria’s Upper Harbour, just north of the creaky Johnson Street Bridge, an aging symbol of waterfront industry. There’s a whiff of sea salt and creosote in the crisp morning air as...

Congratulations to Don McInnes
, CEO and vice-chair of
 Alterra Power Corp., the 2011 Pacific Region Entrepreneur of the Year in Cleantech and Information Technology. In less than a decade, Alterra Power vice-chairman Donald McInnes has turned the clean-energy concept of run-of-the-river power generation into a multi-billion-dollar enterprise.


The Highlander isn’t the only major project at Bear Mountain Resort that ground to a halt when the cash-strapped golf resort began spiralling toward bankruptcy three years ago. But as a lingering symbol of the massive development’s troubled past, its...

Keith Holman’s vision of a wine empire withered on the vine last November as his 
company, Holman Lang Wineries, went into receivership. It’s a cautionary tale for 
other vintners in the fast-growing Okanagan wine industry. Keith Holman built the largest winery company on the Naramata benchlands, only to watch the global credit crunch drive his multi-million-dollar enterprise into the ground less than seven years after he planted his first grapevine.


Elton Pereira still remembers the moment when he realized there was a lucrative and virtually untapped market for anti-spyware programs. It was midway through 2003 and Pereira, then just out of university, was working as a financial planner during the...

A fifth-generation logger 
pursues dream of underwater 
El Dorado. Alana Husby isn’t the first B.C. entrepreneur to dream of making millions from tropical hardwoods submerged in man-made reservoirs. But unlike others, she has actually succeeded in bringing container-loads of the exotic timber to market.


Smaller ports muscle in on Vancouver cruise-ship action. Ferrying cruise-ship passengers ashore for their mandatory stop-and-shop visits on Canadian soil might seem like a creative way to gain a foothold in Vancouver Island’s lucrative cruise-ship tourism industry. But for Nanaimo Port Authority president Bernie Dumas, it’s always been a business model with decidedly limited growth potential.


From Victoria, software developer Edwin Braun engineers the collapse of California. Behind a sliding glass door in his tiny basement office at Vancouver Island Technology Park, Edwin Braun surveys the total annihilation of Los Angeles with all the twisted enthusiasm of a comic book villain destroying the world from a distant underground lair.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. That’s the famous line from Dickens’ 1859 classic A Tale of Two Cities, but it could just as easily describe the year Russell Hallbauer had in 2008.