The tourism authorities that market B.C. and Canada to the world announced shuffles to top management on August 18, with Destination Brititsh Columbia president and CEO Marsha Walden moving to Destination Canada to become that organization’s president and CEO starting August 24. Richard Porges will become the interim president and CEO at Destination British Columbia.
Walden became president and CEO at Destination British Columbia in November 2013. Before that, she spent almost 11 years at the British Columbia Lottery Corp., in roles such as vice-president of strategy, transformation and social responsibility, and vice-president of customer strategy and corporate relations.
She graduated from the Harvard Business School executive program Leading Change and Organizational Renewal. She also holds a Bachelor of Commerce degree from the University of British Columbia.
Porges, meanwhile, has been an integral part of Destination British Columbia's executive team since 2011, and had been the organization's vice-president of corporate development. He joined the marketer's research department in 1999, and was promoted to more senior roles within the provincial government and Destination British Columbia.
As vice-president of corporate development, Porges provided strategic leadership for Destination BC’s corporate communications, research and analytics, human resources, and corporate services departments, according to Destination British Columbia.
He also regularly lectures at the University of Victoria’s (UVIC) department of economics. Before joining Destination British Columbia, Porges taught in the economics, MBA and masters of public administration programs at UVIC. He has also been a consultant for several government and non-profit organizations.
Walden told BIV not long after she accepted the top job at Destination British Columbia that when she was first approached by a recruiter to gauge her interest in the post, she was not sure if she would apply for the job.
Then she remembered a refrain that she often told her children: “Be open to possibilities, say yes whenever you can and good things will flow,” she said in 2014.
She said she slept on the idea of applying for the job and soon realized that the post at Destination British Columbia fit her skill set. It also offered her the chance to be a CEO for the first time in her career.
When Destination Canada's previous CEO, David Goldstein, left in November 2019, he released an online statement saying that he was "recently uplifted by the words of Rahm Emanuel, the former mayor of Chicago, who recently announced he would not be running again, to which he said, 'this has been the job of a lifetime…but not a job for a lifetime.' I couldn’t agree more."
Goldstein then joined Gusto Worldwide Media to become its chief operation officer.
