Jack Poole, former head of the Vancouver Bid Corporation, is an old friend of B.C.'s premier and his logical choice as a member of the Olympic organizing committee's board.

Premier Gordon Campbell has an Olympic-sized problem. He has committed B.C. taxpayers to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for the 2010 Winter Games as well as any cost overruns the OCOG -- the organizing committee of the Olympic Games -- incurs.

But the provincial government has no direct control over the OCOG or its board. Victoria can appoint just three of the 20 directors and there is no requirement that the majority of the directors be from British Columbia. As a result of the Canadian Olympic Committee having seven appointments to the board, eight of the 20 directors are from outside B.C.

Even with 11 of 20 directors from B.C., it would be a stretch to suggest that all of them share the provincial government's interests. It's unlikely, for example, that the one director representing the Lil'wat and Squamish First Nations will always have parallel interests with the B.C. government. The same could be said for Charmaine Crooks, an athlete representative to the International Olympic Committee and an automatic appointment on the board, or Judy Rogers, Vancouver's city manager and one of its two directors, or Peter Dhillon, a Richmond businessman and one of Ottawa's three directors.

And without control of the board, Campbell and his government cannot hand-pick the chairman or the chief executive who will be directly responsible for all that money. Without a hand in the choice of those two key players, the premier also has no assurance that his government will get the lion's share of the credit when it comes to Olympic benefits and legacies even though it is paying the greatest share of the costs.

To get what it wants, the B.C. government has to finesse, lobby or bludgeon the other directors for support, which may prove to be difficult.

The first thing on its list should be to persuade the unpaid directors to fill the 20th spot with a British Columbian and -- from its point of view -- someone sympathetic to the government. The smart thing would be to get three-quarters of the directors to agree on the chairman and then give him or her the 20th spot so that Victoria still has three more appointments.

When it comes to chairman, it's likely Campbell's choice would be Jack Poole. Poole and Campbell are close friends. Poole was Campbell's choice to head the bid corporation. He was also Campbell's choice when, as Vancouver's mayor, Campbell handed over development rights on city land to a company chaired by Poole.

That company, financed by union pension funds, has morphed into Concert Properties Ltd. with Poole still at the head of it. It was heavily involved in the Olympic bid, doing the concept design work for all the Olympic sporting venues, and Concert's chief executive officer David Podmore was chairman of the Yes Committee during the referendum vote.

Tony Tennessy is a potential Poole ally and another Concert connection on the OCOG board. A former bid corporation director, Tennessy is one of Ottawa's three appointees. He's the former president of the International Union of Operating Engineers, a director of Concert Properties and the sole director of Pacific Tower Investments Inc.

Whether the other two Ottawa appointees -- Dhillon and France Chretien-Desmarais -- would support Poole as chairman isn't clear because there's another strong candidate for chairman.

Just this weekend, the COC appointed its final two directors -- Olympic speed-skater Catriona Le May Doan and Michael Phelps. Le May Doan was no surprise. Not only is she a Canadian sports hero, she was the heart of Vancouver's presentation in Prague before the final vote on the 2010 bid city.

But assuming that both men want the job as chairman of the OCOG, Phelps will be Poole's strongest competition.

He has a variety of skills and a diverse background. A lawyer by training, he worked as a Crown prosecutor in Winnipeg before going to Ottawa as a senior bureaucrat. He left the public service to work for Westcoast Energy where he was chairman and chief executive. Currently he is chairman of Ottawa's Wise Persons' Committee examining the structure of capital markets in Canada. He also sits on the board of several major Canadian companies, including CIBC and Canadian Pacific.

He is a long-time supporter of Alpine Canada, the downhill ski federation, and unlike most of the others on the board, Phelps speaks French fluently -- a huge asset in the Olympic movement where French is widely used.

Ottawa and the COC have made their moves in this board game; the next move is Gordon Campbell's. And Campbell needs to get on with it soon so that the OCOG can get on with its work.

dbramham@png.canwest.com

© Copyright 2003 Vancouver Sun