Chester Johnson in 1996 at an opening ceremony for the new Vancouver International Airport he was instrumental in creating.
He may not have been the most loved among his generation of British Columbia rainmakers, but when it came to getting results, Chester Johnson was definitely one of the most revered.
When he died on March 29 at the age of 84, he had had a hand in many of the things that define the province today.
He helped establish the forestry sector, managing companies both big and small; he virtually saved Whistler from bankruptcy and laid the groundwork for its transformation into a world-class resort destination; he turned BC Hydro from a money guzzler into a money maker; he put Vancouver International Airport into provincial hands and turned it into one of the finest in North America; he was chairman of the Haida Power Authority. He even started a winery.
It wasn't always pretty, especially for those who were left in the wake of some of his restructurings. But his business acumen, urge to succeed and no-nonsense style definitely made him effective.
"He didn't like waste and he didn't like abuse of shareholder money or government money and he would clean the closet fast," says Nairne Gray, a protégé of Johnson's who is now managing director of IFP Canada Corp. "He was great with numbers and cutting through corporate fat. There was no one better at that.
"If you wanted a job to get done, Chester was the guy to do it."
Chester Allison Johnson was born on Nov. 1, 1925, in Vancouver.
His father, Alfred, was a senior manager in what was then the Merchant Bank of Canada. His mother, Mildred, a nurse before marrying, ran the household with what has been described as "the efficiency of a ward matron."
Young Chester grew up as the middle of three boys in a family with a true West Coast pedigree. His maternal grandfather, William Chester, was a successful businessman who owned stores across Canada that carried McClary stoves. William was very wealthy for the time but lost nearly everything in the stock market crash of 1929.
"I think I got my gambling spirit and my own sense of intuition from him," Johnson said in a memoir completed three days before his death.
His paternal grandfather, Peter, was a Swedish sea captain who landed in Vancouver in the 1880s. He commanded steamships that worked the coast and carried passengers to the Klondike gold rush. His grandmother Ada, who came to Vancouver from England, was a "real fireball," Johnson recalled, "very strong-willed and controlling, with a fiery temper. In fact, I think I take after her."
But from his more conservative banker father, he learned lessons in prudence that would temper his feistier side.
When he was but 6, his father took him to downtown Vancouver for a first-hand look at the 1932 Hunger March, where 15,000 men headed to City Hall to demand relief from the deprivations of the Great Depression. From the safety of a store window he watched as mounted officers rode into the crowd, smashing heads with their swinging clubs.
Horrified, young Chester asked why he had been brought to witness such a horrible scene. His father replied that he wanted him to see what happens when politicians, world leaders and financiers make mistakes.
"I want you to understand that anything you do in life, if you fail, if you make the wrong decision, somebody is going to get hurt," his father said. "You've got to do it right."
He also learned a lesson about helping out the little guy in times of need.
In 1935, when Chester was 9, his father again took him downtown, this time to witness marching strikers from the Relief Camp Workers' Union. The march turned violent; windows were smashed and stores were looted - all but Woodward's. Woodward's had been spared, his father told him, because the store gave out free food to the hungry.
While the Johnson family weathered the Depression in relative comfort, its middle child never forgot the sight of those ragged, hungry men and that people in positions of power had been responsible for their plight.
Johnson graduated from Lord Byng High School in 1943, signed up for the Royal Canadian Air Force and headed to Toronto for pilot's training on the grounds of the Canadian National Exhibition.
Unfortunately, his shoulder was permanently damaged in a fall during an ill-advised training exercise on a log-run obstacle course and his left eardrum was blown out in a decompression chamber. A dislocated ankle suffered during a basketball game led to a medical discharge and finished off his hopes of becoming a pilot.
Instead, he went back to school, graduating with honours in 1946 with a BA in commerce from the University of British Columbia.
His first job did not go well. He went to work as a clerk for W.F. Gibson & Sons, which ran three small logging companies, but walked out six months later after being chastised for reading the company's confidential financial statements.
Clerking was not for him; he wanted to know how the money was made.
Johnson decided to become a chartered accountant, which he did in 1952. He worked at Gunderson, Stokes, Walton & Co. as a consultant, helping companies manage their businesses. A year later he became a partner.
One of his clients was the legendary forestry mogul H.R. MacMillan. Crunching those numbers was an eye-opener about just how much money could be made in lumber.
Another important client was the hardware chain owned by the family of W.A.C. Bennett, who started a 20-year reign as B.C.'s Social Credit premier in 1952.
Bill Bennett, W.A.C.'s son, who himself became premier in 1975, didn't like the young consultant much when they first met: "Here was this pushy guy telling us how to run our business," he says in the memoir, produced by Echo Memoirs of Vancouver. But the two eventually became friends, a relationship that would benefit them both.
In 1953, Johnson married Janis Ingledew, whose father owned Ingledew's Shoes, a Vancouver institution. Of her father, Johnson said: "I didn't like him and he didn't like me.
"He probably thought I was not worthy of his daughter since he was the well-to-do successful business owner and I was just a CA."
He would not be "just a CA" for long. By 1959, his corporate consulting fees at Gunderson were bringing in more than he was making as partner, so he went on his own as a consultant. And he began investing in businesses.
He and Janis sold their starter home in West Vancouver and bought a bigger place on prestigious Sentinel Hill. In 1960 they adopted baby boy Garfield, and then baby girl Susan in 1962.
Johnson started his climb to business stardom when he was hired as a consultant by Whonnock Lumber Co., which consisted of a lumber mill on the Fraser River, a shake-and-shingle operation on Stave Lake and several logging tracts.
By 1966, he and a partner owned a controlling interest, and he had big plans.
Under his command, Whonnock prospered and went public, raising funds to expand through acquisitions. In 1971, the company bought Weldco Ltd., a logging equipment manufacturer. It acquired Interior lumber companies and changed its name to Whonnock Industries Ltd., with Johnson as president and CEO.
Through the seventies, he increased annual sales from $6-million to $191-million. He was a hard driver and his management mantra worked: He chose the right people to run things, let them run things and paid them well.
"At the same time he was always very approachable and at ease with the men on the ground," former mill supervisor Herb Henri said. "I don't think he had an enemy in our company. Even the union people liked Chester."
His working world was one of hard hats, roll-up-the-sleeves number crunching, long hours, whisky and cigars. But he also treasured family time at his beloved cottage on Chain Lake, 40 kilometres northeast of Princeton, B.C.
He started Fibreco Export to export wood chips and worked with Sam Ketcham, head of West Fraser Timber, to find buyers in Japan.
"He had an awesome reputation as a tough operator," recalled his trusted project manager Henry Wakabayaksi, "but we always got on very well."
Johnson made his first lump-sum million when he sold Whonnock to Sauder Industries in 1977. Later, he said he would have gotten much richer had he kept control of Whonnock by borrowing the $3-million necessary to buy out the other shareholders and stave off Sauder's bid. But at the time, he thought it too risky. He stayed on as president and CEO, and bought out the Weldco subsidiary.
In early 1980, he got a call from Pete Ketcham of West Fraser, which had lost CEO Sam Ketcham in a helicopter crash in 1977. New management was not working out and the first family of lumber needed his help. As the new CEO of West Fraser, Johnson set out to resolve the company's legal problems, help it weather the recession of the early eighties and to make it grow.
At the same time he was building a reputation as B.C.'s corporate Mr. Fix-It, he was also getting involved in politics, raising funds for Bill Bennett, who had won W.A.C.'s seat in 1973. He was effective at that as well and became Bennett's go-to guy in the private sector, making him a powerful backroom player.
"Chester was a pretty wealthy guy," notes Gray. "But he was more powerful than wealthy. He loved the power and he used it. If Chester wanted you to donate 10 grand, you'd do it."
Johnson's political connections soon allowed him to add Saviour of Troubled Public Entities to his résumé as a series of high-profile postings came his way.
In 1983, Bennett created Whistler Land Co. Developments as a Crown corporation to take over the insolvent Whistler Village Land Co., and put Johnson in charge of its board. He didn't pay him, but he gave him free rein.
Johnson's first order of business was to sideline the local politicians who got in his way. Then he set about seeing what could be made of the situation - a stalled arena, half-finished hotels and condos, and piles of debt.
He decided what Whistler needed was a convention centre, a development that would attract visitors from far and wide, all year around. He told Bennett he would need at least $21-million, and he got it, laying the foundation for what Whistler was to become.
In 1984, Bennett put Johnson on the board of BC Hydro.
The giant utility was bleeding cash - it had $8-billion in long-term debt and was paying $750-million a year in interest. With the era of large dams coming to an end, it had also lost its focus.
When its chairman Robert Bonner fell into legal trouble over a land deal, Johnson was sent to fire him and was put at the helm with a $50,000-a-year salary. It was much less than could be made in the private sector, but he relished the opportunity.
"I told the premier I would do it," Johnson recalled. "But I was certain it was going to be hard and unpleasant. BC Hydro had massive debt; they were spending money like drunk sailors, it was bloated, hidebound and chock full of employees twiddling their thumbs."
The utility had already shrunk from 10,000 employees to 7,500 through layoffs and early retirements. When Johnson came in swinging the axe, another 1,000 were gone, mainly engineers.
"I did what I had to do," he recalled, "but I didn't like it."
He got rid of the executive jets and the swanky executive dining room on the 21st floor.
"The executives," he said, "can eat down in the cafeteria with everybody else."
He transformed the bureaucratic dam builder into a lean energy marketer, finding ways to sell its surplus capacity and make some badly needed cash.
Things were going well. But when Bennett announced his retirement and Bill Vander Zalm became premier in 1986, Johnson knew he wouldn't stay long at Hydro.
He never liked or trusted Vander Zalm and shared Bennett's prescient musings that his ascendancy would be the beginning of the end of the Socreds, which came to pass.
Johnson was also dealing with family problems and health issues. He had a quadruple bypass in October and announced his resignation at the end of the year.
Before he left, however, there was another high-profile provincial cleanup job to do, one that would test the integrity of all involved.
He was put in charge of a group charged with tearing down Expo 86. With so many government and other organizations involved, it was a tricky exercise. Auctioning off the pavilions and their contents went smoothly.
But 200 acres of Expo lands were a different matter. After receiving offers from developers, the board got its highest bid - $320-million - from Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing. But Vander Zalm tried to see the land go to a friend, an effort that would lead to a political scandal.
The board thwarted the premier, but was summarily fired for its lack of co-operation. Being fired put Johnson at the other end of the stick for the first time in his life. He took it philosophically and later said, "I was doing it for nothing anyway."
Besides, it wasn't as though there weren't more big jobs that needed doing.
Johnson had been successful in raising money for Brian Mulroney and the federal Tories, who had swept into office in 1984, and the Privy Council had appointed him to the Economic Council of Canada, a post he relished.
And another forestry giant needed his help. Western Pulp Ltd., part of a logging empire run by his long-time friend Herb Doman, was having trouble keeping up with foreign competition, and Doman asked him to come in and fix things. He rationalized operations, decreased production at money-losing operations and introduced new products with higher profit margins.
"He really pulled the coals out of the fire for us," said Jack Abercrombie, an executive with the company at that time.
Johnson eventually had a falling out with Doman over succession issues and his friend's tendency to borrow huge sums of money and take big risks. The company ended up in bankruptcy court with Brascan, the huge Ontario asset-management company, getting the spoils.
It was not an end that Johnson liked to see. Though he could be ruthless in wielding the knife, he saw necessary cutbacks as a pruning exercise that would ultimately help organizations grow. Those who lost jobs at his hand, of course, thought him more a villain than a saviour. But those who worked with him said he did not believe in cutting well-functioning companies simply to squeeze out higher profits.
In his memoir, Johnson talks disapprovingly of Brascan and what it did to a once-proud forestry company he felt still had potential. "They're a bunch of financial people, they're not operators … they've taken every one of those assets down to nothing."
Along those lines, he saved special invective for the infamous Al Dunlap, known as Chainsaw Al for his love of dismantling U.S. companies and selling off their parts to make fortunes for major shareholders. As a long-time board member of Scott Paper Canada, Johnson had first-hand experience with Dunlap, who engineered a $7-billion merger between Kimberly-Clark and Scott Paper in 1995. Kimberley-Clark sold off Scott Paper Canada, and Dunlap pocketed more than $100-million.
"Chainsaw was the worst kind of corporate leader," he said. "He didn't care two bits for the company or its work force. It was disgraceful."
Johnson's last high-profile public job - and the toughest one he said he ever had - was leading negotiations to transfer responsibility of Vancouver International Airport, a $1.4-billion asset, from Ottawa to the province.
In 1988, he was told by provincial minister Grace McCarthy that the project would take six months. In the end it took years.
"It was like an elephant fighting a mouse," Johnson recalled of his time chairing the Vancouver International Airport Transition Advisory Group. "And we were the mouse."
A major sticking point was Ottawa's demand for increased rents. Johnson, known as a doer, became frustrated with the slow pace of bureaucracy and threatened then-prime-minister Kim Campbell with resignation of the entire board if things didn't move along. That helped a bit, but the bureaucrats still had trouble relating to his table-pounding ways. Finally, in April, 1992, they signed an agreement. Johnson felt that Ottawa got too good of a deal, but he went forward with gusto on a multimillion-dollar expansion that brought a new 16-gate terminal building, which opened in 1996.
His crowning achievement was the commissioning of Spirit of Haida Gwaii, the Jade Canoe, by renowned Haida artist Bill Reid. The multimillion-dollar bronze casting with a green patina, much photographed at the airport, was a hard sell as far as the board went, but in usual fashion Johnson prevailed.
In retirement, he worked with the Haida on land claims and economic development issues and indulged in one of his favourite passions - fishing. His son Garfield said the last time he went - after many heart operations - he had to be strapped into the boat in his wheelchair.
Johnson called the memoir, co-written with Vancouver writer Will Peacock, Doing It Right - and with the exception of a disastrous real estate investment in Mexico and selling some businesses too soon, he mainly did.
He wasn't afraid, though, to say so when he got it wrong. At the end of his life, he said he realized he hadn't handled family problems right. Though happily remarried, he regretted the bitterness caused by his divorce from Janis, which was finalized in 1991 after much legal wrangling. He also said he regretted mistakes he made during his daughter Susan's teenage-rebellion years. And he felt bad that he hadn't patched things up with Herb Doman before his friend's death in 2007.
There was definitely a softer side to the hard-driving Mr. Fix-It, something Garfield said was there but that most people never got to see.
Jack Munro, former president of International Forestry Workers Canada, tells a story from the 1980s when one of his members, who was on strike, had his hydro cut off because he couldn't pay the bill. Johnson, whom he knew well from the forestry industry, was running BC Hydro at the time so Munro gave him a call. The next day, a memo went out from the chairman's office saying that no striking forestry worker was to have power cut off until after the strike was settled.
"That certainly endeared me," Munro said, noting that they had many disagreements over the years, which was to be expected.
"I would say that Chester had a better feel for the people who worked for him than some of the CEOs," he said. "He did things the way he wanted to do them. He was Chester."
Chester Johnson leaves his son Garfield, his daughter Susan, his wife Doreen, his stepchildren and eight grandchildren.