The Vancouver Board of Trade honoured H.Y. Louie Co. Ltd. chairman Brandt Louie with its Rix Award for engaged community citizenship and Vancity with the Rix Award for engaged corporate citizenship at a sold-out Governors’ Banquet April 5.
Louie rose through the ranks of the family business and was named president in 1987. He became chairman and CEO of London Drugs in 1998.
Now chancellor of Simon Fraser University, Louie is also on the council of governors of Vancouver Community College and is a governor of the Vancouver Board of Trade and the B.C. Business Council. He is a Fraser Institute trustee and Historica Foundation of Canada director.
Louie is also a philanthropist who has dedicated his energy toward medical and educational institutions.
The board of trade also inducted Sue Paish, CEO of Pharmasave Drugs (National) Ltd., to its council of governors and recognized outgoing managing director Darcy Rezac with the title of outgoing managing director emeritus.
Rezac had been managing director of the Board of Trade for 24 years. (See “Board Feat” – issue 1119; April 5-11.)
“For the first time in my life, I’m going to [do] my own thing,” Rezac told Business in Vancouver recently on a sunny afternoon while sitting in his Volkswagen Beetle convertible and looking across False Creek to the city that he has spent his life trying to improve.
He plans to teach, write books and spend time with his grandchildren fishing from the deck of his Fort Langley home.
“I can pursue some opportunities that I wouldn’t have been able to do before because of time and what I did for a living.”