Former Nova Corp. boss leaves a lasting legacy
Bob Blair, an Alberta empire builder, died April 18. He was 79
Takeovers eventually broke up Blair’s corporate empire, but the mainstays of western livelihoods that he built still stand under their changed ownership. The legacies include Husky Energy’s Lloydminster heavy-oil upgrader, the Joffre petrochemical complex mid way between Edmonton and Calgary, and the Foothills Pipelines natural gas export routes to California and the middle-western United States.
Blair’s talent as an industrial warrior prince shone in his most famous coup, when Nova created Foothills by winning the Canadian and U.S. rights to build the proposed Alaska Natural Gas Transportation System. To this day, Foothills is officially the “prebuild” of the northern megaproject under a 1978 treaty between Ottawa and Washington. TransCanada Corp. owes its edge in the current rivalry to finish constructing the ANGTS to owning Blair’s brainchild as a result of its 1999 takeover of Nova.
He teamed up with counterparts from British Columbia’s provincial gas pipeline grid, at the time named Westcoast Transmission, to win the northern megaproject rights against a corporate army called Canadian Arctic Gas.
“Even a David and Goliath analogy would be an understatement,” former Westcoast president Ed Phillips wrote in a memoir titled Guts & Guile. “Foothills was a modest corporate partnership of two relatively small, regional pipelines. Arctic Gas was a collection of the mightiest petroleum companies, pipelines and gas utilities in North America. We were chided on one occasion that our entire group was smaller than the public relations crew of Arctic Gas.”
But with Blair in the saddle, “there was a flip side to this mismatch in size,” Phillips recalled. “Arctic Gas was huge, ponderous, expensive, inflexible, slow to react, totally predictable and influenced by too many partners with conflicting agendas. Their vertical organization of all sectors of the industry could not be harmonized. Foothills had the advantage of being a manageable size, inexpensive, quick to respond, unpredictable and having only two masters with identical agendas.”
Methods pioneered by Blair ranged from environmental engineering initiatives to wearing clothes that created an image of fitting in with influential aboriginal and green groups. Industry captains hung up their suits and attended northern regulatory hearings in denim, wool socks and work shirts.
An earthy style came naturally to Blair, who was famous for wearing cowboy boots to Toronto meetings with Bay Street financiers. And he was no dude merely striking a western pose, even though he had a Canadian version of an Ivy League education and his father Sidney Blair ranked second only to Edmonton’s revered Karl Clark as a founder of the oil sands industry.
There was often mud on Blair’s boots. At his memorial service, daughter Megan Roughley told how her father rode and sometimes fell off a temperamental work horse while herding cattle around the family ranch west of Calgary at Bragg Creek. Treasured memories included a day-long battle of wills with a bull that refused to cross a bridge and had to be tugged a very long way to winter pasture.
The Blair heritage includes love of country, willingness to work hard and faith that striving eventually pays off, Roughley said. She summed up a lesson taught by her father’s life this way: “There is always a way to get home if you’re smart enough and determined enough.”
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