Who is B.C.'s best paid CEO?

THE#BCBIZDAILY
Need-to-know news and insight for Wednesday, Jan. 21

CEO pay soars
B.C.’s most well compensated CEOs are richer than you (probably) think. Seven Vancouver-based CEOs ranked on the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives annual roundup of Canada’s 100 highest paid executives in 2014, and no surprise, four of the seven names from B.C. are in mining. Canada’s top 100 CEOs make, on average, $9.2 million, or 190 times more than the Canadian average income of $47,358, notes the report.

Chuck Jeannes (Goldcorp Inc.) — $10.2 million
Darren Entwistle (TELUS Corp.) — $10.1 million
Donald Lindsay (Teck Resources Ltd.) — $9.9 million
Paul Wright (Eldorado Gold Corp.) — $7.4 million
Randy Smallwood (Silver Wheaton Corp.) — $6.0 million
L. Scott Thomson (Finning International Inc.) — $5.6 million
David Demers (Westport Innovations Inc.) — $4.5 million

Buy American
Should a construction project in Canada be required to use U.S. steel? Canada’s trade minister Ed Fast doesn’t seem to think so. But Prince Rupert’s tourism businesses could lose out in a dispute between the Canadian government and the Alaska state ferry system (which is building the terminal), explained Scott Farwell, chair of Tourism Prince Rupert, in an interview with Daybreak North. The terminal is responsible for 20 per cent of the city’s leisure visitors alone. So why is the federal government fussing over $5 million in steel? “It’s an election year,” said Farwell.

Logging’s decent fortunes
An uptick in demand for lumber and wood panels in the U.S. is good news for B.C.’s log truckers, who are convening this week for the Truck Loggers Association’s (TLA) annual convention in Victoria. “Logging is a high capital, high risk, low return business,” explained Dave Gregson, a contractor and owner of Copcan Contracting, to Truck Logger BC. The cost of equipment and labour plagued the industry for years as it competed against well-paid mining and oil and gas camps (“We can’t compete with the oil and gas sector for wages,” said TLA executive director Dwight Yochim last year). Hence, B.C.’s sluggish mining and oil and gas sectors could contain a silver lining for the province’s foresters.