When considering all she’s accomplished in her working life, Susan Yurkovich admits her personal highlight may be an obvious choice.
“The biggest achievement for my career is getting the Site C project approved,” said BC Hydro’s executive vice-president in charge of the hydroelectric dam project.
“It’s been a very rigorous process. It’s taken almost everything I have and then some.”
The $9 billion project, which has been in the works for decades, was finally given the green light in December.
Yurkovich lights up when asked for details about how skilled labour demands for the project could be affected by rising oil prices and declining mining revenue. It’s minutiae for some, but for Yurkovich it’s a passion.
The only other moments she shows as much enthusiasm when speaking to Business in Vancouver is when her family comes up.
Husband Jonathan Burke, COO of Blackcomb Aviation and a former helicopter pilot, is father to her sons Anthony, 13, and Cameron, 10.
“It’s a house full of boys,” she said, adding even the family dog, Charlie, carries a Y chromosome.
But, she said, “I’m super-grounded by my family.”
Her strong sense of family stretches back to her relationships with her grandmothers, whom she describes as two of the biggest female influences in her life.
“They were both very strong women in a very different way,” Yurkovich said. “But both were pivotal for me.”
One was an immigrant who left her family in Croatia and came to Canada on her own when she was young. She raised two boys (including Yurkovich’s father) while making ends meet by scrubbing floors and taking in boarders in the family’s Richmond home after her first husband died.
“She had a Grade 8 education,” Yurkovich said. “But she was very smart and very wise.”
On her mother’s side, Yurkovich’s grandmother came from a “well-to-do” family and attended the University of British Columbia (UBC).
“She did something extraordinary – [women] didn’t go to university in the 1920s,” Yurkovich said.
Yurkovich herself was raised with the same broad horizons. While she was growing up in Richmond, her mom and dad – a nurse and physician, respectively – didn’t pressure her to take a path into business.
“I never felt like I had any limits about what I could do,” she said.
Yurkovich received her arts degree from UBC and later earned her master’s degree in business administration at the same school before getting a diploma in international business from the Netherlands’ Erasmus University Rotterdam.
Yurkovich eventually got a job “completely by accident” working as an adviser to the minister of Indian affairs and northern development in Ottawa.
Upon returning to B.C., she jumped into the forestry sector for a decade and worked her way up to the position of vice-president of corporate affairs at Canfor.
“Sometimes I talk to younger people today with this solidly planned-out career map and I’m kind of in awe, because they thought it all the way through,” she said. “And I think, ‘Oh, my gosh. How did I ever survive?’ But I think what you have to do is understand where your strengths are and where your interests lie and try to find where they intersect.”
And her family continued to influence her career both directly and indirectly.
When she left Canfor, pregnant with her second son, she began providing consulting services to various organizations.
That led to a job offer from BC Hydro’s then-CEO, Bob Elton.
Her oversight of the Site C project ramped up following his departure from the Crown corporation. Yurkovich now has 100 engineers, an environmental assessment team, a finance group and First Nations consultants who all report to her.
She described her management style as casual, and even finds herself prone to sitting on desks.
She said that building a team, letting them excel at what they do best and being comfortable working with everyone is a must for one big reason:
“You see your people in the office more than you see your people at home.”
