In 1987, Ian McKay walked onto a New York trading floor for the first time. The 23-year-old wore a suit borrowed from his older brother and didn't know a thing about business – he'd studied political science and Asia Pacific studies at the University of British Columbia.
"I get out on the trading floor and there are 300 people and they're all screaming and yelling. This is a very aggressive, New York-style brokerage firm," McKay recalled.
"They're accustomed to the company sending people out onto the floor as prospective trainees, and they treat you pretty rough, just to test your mettle, how thick your skin is."
The tall, slight McKay – who today at 50 projects an air of bemused calm – wasn't fazed. Asked to report back to the firm's CEO at the end of the day, he said he still had no idea how the business worked, "but I learned that those are the hardest-working people I've ever seen, and they're passionate about their job and I want to do that."
He was hired on the spot – in large part because he spoke Japanese and had lived in Japan while on a student exchange. After working in New York for a time, he was shipped out with five other employees to set up the firm's office in Tokyo. He would eventually become managing director of the Tokyo office.
"In the mid-'80s, Japan Inc. was so huge and formidable and it was in the headlines of every newspaper," McKay said. "This firm in New York desperately wanted to break into the Japanese financial markets."
Nearly 30 years later, McKay has come home to Vancouver after a career in international finance, first in Tokyo and then in London, followed by a stint in Ottawa as a policy adviser to two industry ministers.
From 2010 to 2013, he was national director of the Liberal Party of Canada.
There was also his unsuccessful run at a federal seat in 2000 in the riding of West Vancouver-Sea to Sky, an experience he describes as "awesome," but one he's never been tempted to repeat.
McKay was hired as CEO of the Vancouver Economic Commission (VEC), the City of Vancouver's economic development agency, in September 2013.
Although he's spent nearly all of his adult life abroad or in Ottawa, McKay, who was raised in Penticton, said he'll have no trouble singing Vancouver's praises.
"Everywhere I have gone in my life, here or overseas, the first thing people say to me is 'Vancouver, what a beautiful city,'" said McKay, who lives in a downtown condo and has embraced a carless, urban lifestyle.
"[While] respecting that enormously, we also have a mandate to alter that brand a little bit to build on that, and maybe have people start saying it's also a smart city."
McKay is well suited to work at the intersection of government and business, said Bob Rae, a former member of Parliament and premier of Ontario. The two worked together closely when Rae was interim leader of the Liberal Party and McKay was national director.
"He's enormously practical," Rae said. "He has an international perspective that allows him to bring in a lot of his thinking about Asia and his knowledge of Asia, and also his knowledge of how politicians work and political organizations."
Rae credits McKay with heading a difficult period in the party's history: the Liberals had suffered a humiliating defeat in the 2011 federal election, and the party was in financial disarray.
It also badly needed to be brought into the 21st century.
"A lot of the organizational success of the party in the year since he left owes iys debt to him," Rae said.
"He was the one who really began the restructuring of the office, identifying the need for new technologies and for new approaches for fundraising and setting new targets for membership and mobilizing the volunteers."
Many of those new approaches have been borrowed from the Barack Obama campaigns of 2008 and 2012, which used social media and big data to target voters and make best use of volunteers.
McKay is now focused on getting the VEC up to date: the organization is planning to launch a new website later this year, which McKay says will feature "storytelling capacity and rich, research-based data."
"If you're a university grad living in Dallas or Dusseldorf or Denmark and you want to take your highly sought-after skills somewhere, and you start surfing the web, we want you to find Vancouver and find compelling reasons why you're going to buy a ticket to come here and build your business," McKay said.
Another priority will be developing strategic markets, especially in Asia.
Just a month after starting his new job, McKay accompanied VEC staff, film, culture and technology businesses and Vancouver's mayor, Gregor Robertson, on a four-city trade mission to China.
Those efforts will continue, McKay said. While trade missions were once the exclusive purview of the federal government, cities are increasingly heading out on their own targeted missions, and the federal government is taking note: the Department of Foreign Affairs is working with 12 Canadian cities to provide resources to develop strategic markets.
While recent provincial trade missions have focused heavily on B.C.'s potential liquefied natural gas industry, Vancouver's mission was made up of businesses from the creative and technology sectors – industries the city has been focused on boosting.
The VEC is also concentrating on growing B.C.'s clean-tech sector. The City of Vancouver hopes to create a "green enterprise zone," possibly in the False Creek Flats area.
While the industry has had difficulty in recent years finding venture capital funding, and companies such as Ballard (TSX:BLD) have had chronic problems turning a profit, McKay said the trip to China illustrated that the market demand for clean technology is there.
While some critics have scoffed at Vancouver's efforts to become the "greenest city," McKay said that policy direction will pay off.
"There are big countries, big companies, big projects that are desperate for clean solutions for how they build their buildings, how they process their resources, how they structure their factories, how they treat their water that's used in all of those processes.
"The technologies don't just have to work, they have to be scalable, because the global demand is going to be insatiable."
