We Two Are One
At the time of the merger, the Power Commission regions were: South Interior, managed by Larry Wight; Central Interior, managed by Stu Burnell; and the Coastal region, managed by Arnold McGillivray. (A fourth region, North Coast, was soon added, managed by Don McLennan.) After the merger, two new regions were added that reflected BC Electric territory: metropolitan Vancouver, headed up by Guy Barclay, and the Fraser Valley managed by Alan Macdonald.
The organizational reconfiguration was the "easy" part. Merging two accomplished and proud sets of employees was another matter. BCPC and BC Electric staff reacted to the merger in countless ways that ranged from shock and sadness to indifference and cynicism. Jack Edwards, who had been a motorman and driver with BC Electric since 1939, took the change in stride.
It didn't bother me at all because they were both good companies. Those who were on the buses and who stayed kept the same positions when Hydro took over. It didn't change anything.
Bill Duncan, who was working in BC Electric's freight division, looks back on the merger with a cool realism.
I was low enough down on the totem pole that I didn't know what was happening. I wasn't aware BC Hydro was coming. It came suddenly-although not too suddenly, because senior management people disposed of their shares before the takeover.
There were some changes. People from both organizations who had been in management were gradually eased out. But that part of it wasn't sudden. Mildred Jeffery of BC Electric was deeply affected by the merger and eventually joined a number of people who chose to leave BC Hydro on principle.
I was a free-enterprise person, and when the company was taken over, well-you can't write any more as a public relations person. There is a whole different thrust. I spun my wheels for a year and then left. Many top people left. They could see they wouldn't survive. We all had offers.
I left for philosophical reasons, but I think my term was coming to an end. It was a different company after the merger. My 20 years there were exciting ones-there was so much positive change. It was a growing period, and it was great to see all these new things happening, and to be writing about it was wonderful. To me, the move from 425 Carrall to our beautiful new building was a personal highlight. Now, of course, there is all sorts of talk of privatization at BC Hydro. What goes around comes around.
Ray Flynn of BCE remembers small irritants from the merger such as when he began to work with Max Munro, an extremely popular BCPC manager.
We were not too happy about it. BC Electric was kind of a big family thing, which did things for us that the BC Hydro didn't. We all got a special rate on the electricity, for instance. They used to put two meters in your house, and you only paid a dollar for all your lights. You only paid for your range and water heater on the meter.
There was a bitterness, particularly in the higher levels. When I moved to my job as a sales rep in Fort St. John in the early 1960s, Max was the district manager there. Now, Max and I have been friends for 30 years, so I can say this now, but at the time, he told me, "I don't want a sales rep. I wanted a utility man that could work with a crew. But those damn fools down there figure we should have a sales rep." And he was pretty critical to start with. He was asking me, "Where have you been and what have you done?" In my job, you couldn't fill in a statistic and say I did this or I did that. You could say, "I've been out and I've talked to four customers about electric heat." So he'd ask, "Okay, so what's happened about it?" Well, I wouldn't know right then, but six months down the line, three of the four put electric heat in. But you couldn't report that and say for sure "I got those jobs" or "I sold that."
Many Power Commission employees watched the merger unfold with a great deal of trepidation. Ted Berger, Russ Hamilton, and Jerry Wills recall finding out that not only were the two companies' respective management styles very different but so were the union locals.
Russ: We were highly suspicious. That first meeting we had, the coordinator came in and said Hydro was going to close this little shop down. All our stuff was no good. But it wasn't many months later that they adopted a lot of our methods. One fellow once complained to me, "I thought we took over the Power Commission. Out here it seems like they took over us."
Ted: There had to be an amalgamation of the union, too, which resulted in the creation of BC Hydro local 258. In Vancouver, 213 was the big one, and 230 in Victoria, but there were not exclusive locals for the companies. There seemed to be a world of difference in the local that served BCE versus the ones at the Power Commission. Common sense prevailed with BCPC, while BCE was pretty militant. They'd had a big strike prior to the Hydro merger.
Jerry: We had an awful job getting along with them. Arnold Keep was running 213 at the time, and they were not happy with the way we operated. We were very easy to get along with and he wasn't. We had trouble getting together.
Russ: They had a different attitude-strictly union.
Ted: A positive thing about amalgamation was that safety gradually took a more prominent role. BCE safety rules were actually part of the union agreement so it was quite political. At times the Power Commission had hired a bunch of linemen from the prairies and they got people from Saskatchewan and Manitoba who had served good apprenticeships. I think this helped make people realize our training shortcomings. It just got better all the time.
The Power Commission's Joe West, who had once studied under Shrum, came over from BCPC's modest Victoria headquarters to work in the construction division. He was based out of Hydro's head office on Burrard Street in Vancouver.
The beautiful modern glass tower on Burrard Street was a far cry from the old brick building in Victoria and we had a few things to learn. This included all about swivelling, spring office chairs requiring care when leaning back-and about other spring seats in the men's room. And, most importantly, noting the number of windows in officials' offices, denoting rank and importance. There was bound to be some ruffled feathers about seniority and about "streamlining" but it only took 20 years or so to work itself out.
Tom Farmer saw the merger at mid-management level and found that the distinct styles of the two organizations made for very different approaches to meetings.
What I could see was that BC Electric was being run by a number of specialists, while the Power Commission was operating out of sort of a general nature. To give you an idea, when we went into Vancouver for meetings over regionalization, four of six regional managers were BC Power Commission men, and the other two were BC Electric background. You went right through all the various functions: cost accounting, building of lines, maintenance of diesels. For each one they [the BC Electric managers] had their own specialists come into the room. If the discussions touched on vehicles, they sent their man into the room and discussed vehicle requirements. If you discussed personnel, their man came into the room and you discussed personnel. Yet the four Commission regional managers were sitting there the whole time, speaking to each of these functions.
One of the pressing issues at Hydro was to create a new logo for the company. When the distinctive logo was unveiled in 1962, many former BC Electric employees bitterly called it "the sign of the double-cross." Reg Racine of the BCE lighting department has a more light-hearted memory.
I remember a humorous situation at a first meeting where the new six-pointed BC Hydro symbol was introduced. The public relations developer produced a two-page promo document explaining how the two lower blue legs represented the waters of BC and how the two top green legs represented the forests of BC, gas and electricity, the two co-chairmen, et cetera. One perceptive employee remarked that the symbol also represented a bunch of blue people working under two greenhorns. Nevertheless, the symbol proved popular over the years.
The logo, although tweaked a few times over the years, was a remarkably durable one.
