The last time Doug Allen was named interim CEO of a transportation outfit, he sold $450 million worth of ferries for $19 million and then privatized the highest-visibility Crown corporation in the entire provincial government.
He accomplished those startling moves 12 years ago with characteristic low-key affability. By that point, he was already a master at diving into any number of red-flagged files to sort things out and calm things down.
Catherine Holt, his former business partner at the Sage Group through 10 years of special projects for government, summed him up as an “agent of change” who always delivers.
Allen is the bureaucratic equivalent of a firefighter. When the alarm sounds, the politicians call him in. One way or the other, he puts out the fire.
Today, TransLink is smouldering and threatening to turn into a political inferno, depending on which way the referendum wind blows on a proposed new tax. TransLink announced last week it has removed CEO Ian Jarvis. So the call went out again, and Allen answered it. He has been quietly running the private company InTransit B.C., which will operate the Canada Line from downtown Vancouver to the airport for the next 30 years, under contract to TransLink.
It’s the latest chapter in a long series of adventures for the well-regarded fixer.
Senior government officials often frame the official cabinet order naming them to their post and hang it in their office. A retired deputy recalls dropping by Allen’s office once.
He had so many framed orders-in-council they looked like wallpaper.
He grew up in Grande Prairie, Alta., childhood friend of David Emerson, and worked for the federal government early on before being recruited to Victoria by Emerson.
He arrived at the senior reaches of government in 1991 as deputy minister of government services, after a stint with the Treasury Board.
When a serious problem emerged in the deputy health minister’s office, he was named acting deputy minister of health and smoothed things out, later officially taking the job.
He was deputy to hard-charging employment and investment minister Glen Clark during the Mike Harcourt government.
When Clark became premier, he decreed that 21,000 new jobs would be created in the forest industry. Allen was a deputy minister at the time, charged with making it happen.
He took a time out to work in Ethiopia on governance issues.
He later set up the Sage Group with Holt. Former cabinet minister Andrew Petter picked him to do a detailed report on ICBC, another assignment fraught with peril. No-fault insurance was considered as an option but eventually rejected. Most of his other recommendations were put in effect and some survive today. A fraud crackdown, aggressive accident prevention, a traffic-safety commission, a new licence-testing system.
He also worked on a commission that looked into problems in licensing community-care facilities.
Allen was just as valuable to the B.C. Liberals after they took over in 2001 as he was to the previous NDP government.
With B.C. Ferries a provincial laughingstock after the fast ferries failure, the government fired the boss and installed Allen as interim CEO.
His marching orders were to get rid of the ferries ASAP, by any method short of scuttling them, and then fix the system as a whole.
The three aluminum catamarans were auctioned off for next-to-nothing. Then Allen helped devise the blueprint still in effect today, a publicly owned, privately operated company. He started the planning for three new ships and urged a new fleet-wide focus on the customer. He sat on the board for the first few years.
The Sage Group also delved into serious problems with the ministry of children and families, urging delay of a regionalization plan they found wasn’t being executed properly.
With 25 years of damping down crises behind him, he’s a good choice for this new gig.
Just so you know: Allen phoned me by chance an hour or so after his appointment. We chatted briefly, but I could barely understand anything he said. Because he was on the SkyTrain. That’s a good sign.
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