On their parents’ fridge in Thunder Bay, there’s a photo of Jay and Laura Dilley as children at the family’s summer cabin on the shore of Lake Superior. They’re about to start a race.
“You can see that I’ve got my hand out and I’m pushing Laura away before the race even starts,” Jay said. “There is this competitiveness, but it’s a good competitiveness.”
To the siblings, that picture sums up both the close-knit family life and intense competitiveness that shaped them as youngsters and would drive them to achieve in two very different careers. Laura, 33, is executive director of the PACE Society, a non-profit providing advocacy and social services to sex workers in the Downtown Eastside. Jay, 36, is the president of Hawkair, a northern B.C. airline based in Terrace.
As different as their jobs are, there are commonalities. Both have tied their practical management skills to lofty social goals. When Laura took over at PACE, the society was squatting in a condemned building and, with less than $15,000 in annual revenue, was down to two employees and just one funder, the City of Vancouver. Under her leadership, the organization found a permanent home and more funding sources. It now employs 10 people.
At Hawkair, Jay has set his sights on the major challenge of gender disparity in the airline industry, where women represent just 5% of executives, 4% of pilots and 7% of maintenance workers. He’s created a mentorship and training program aimed at boosting women’s participation in those higher-paying roles.
Their younger sister, Heather, is a registered massage therapist in Thunder Bay, where she runs a business called Experience Health.
“When I started ‘real’ jobs, when I was outside of the family, I looked around and went, literally, ‘What the hell?’ because having grown up with Laura and Heather, I always viewed them as people and as equals, but all of a sudden you get this dose of reality,” Jay said.
“What we experienced growing up was not what other people considered to be normal and all of a sudden there was this class difference and expectation difference of having women in the business.”
Jay and Laura grew up watching their parents run a small business – a stereo and home electronics store that later morphed into a satellite-dish installation business.
“We started at a really young age helping out wherever we could,” Laura said. “My parents were the Jack and Jill of all trades.
“We were watching my mother do the bookkeeping and the sales and marketing, while my dad was doing a lot of the manual labour. He’d go out to remote communities and put up satellite dishes on a lot of the reserves.”
As teenagers, Laura began handling sales calls for her parents’ business while Jay worked for, then ran, a separate courier business started by a friend of his father’s.
Their grandmothers were another strong influence. Both women had worked outside the home and both pushed their grandchildren to aim high. Laura recalls how their maternal grandmother, a snowbird who lived with them six months of the year, would bring out her own straight-A report cards as an example. She also remembers intense games of Scrabble with her grandmother, which were aggressive to the point that “my mom won’t play Scrabble with me anymore, it was that competitive.”
“If you got a good mark, you were related to her,” Jay said. “Bad mark? That might be somebody else.”
The satellite business never made the Dilley family rich. Jay and Laura put themselves through university and knew they would be on their own when the time came to get started in their first jobs.
Although they went to different cities to attend university, the siblings found themselves both living in Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories for a time.
Jay had moved there to work at an airline called Arctic Sunwest Charters after doing management consultant work in Edmonton.
“I went up north and was chatting with an executive at one of the airlines, and he said, ‘We can talk about all of the problems. I know I need someone to fix problems,’” he said. “That got me excited because I was so used to giving people solutions but not seeing the execution.”
He told his sister there were lots of job opportunities in the north. She had just graduated with a bachelor’s degree in economics from Dalhousie University in Halifax; most of her friends were working in coffee shops. She took her brother’s advice and moved to Yellowknife to work as a transportation planner for the territorial government.
Laura went on to get a bachelor’s degree in education (she is working on a master’s degree in the same field), and turned her focus to social issues, working with homeless people in Ottawa and, when she moved to Vancouver, as a health advocate for disabled and marginalized people who needed care.
PACE appealed to her because it was a peer-driven organization that had been created by sex workers to help other sex workers. The organization was at risk of folding when Laura took on the job.
“PACE has been around for 22 years, and I thought, ‘What a travesty to let this fall by the wayside,’” she said.
Meanwhile, Jay’s goal for Hawkair is to become a “trendsetter” among northern airlines – and for his successor to be one of the women from the company’s Women in Leadership program.
Both credit their outdoors-loving, water-skiing, handyman father for giving them strong values of right and wrong.
“My father was always the one who would stick up for anyone when an injustice happened,” Laura said. “Those values were instilled at a young age – if you see something that’s happening that’s not right, speak up.”
Then and now, the family operates as a team, pushing and encouraging each other to win. As children, the Dilley kids water-skied, played soccer and took part in competitive downhill ski racing. “If she won at ski racing we’d be comparing times,” Jay said.
Some things never change.
“When she was named executive director of [PACE] I was like, ‘Well you’ve done a few things quicker than I have,” Jay said, adding: “‘Which is great!’”
Today, that competitive spirit translates into encouragement for each other in their separate careers, which are often a topic of conversation.
“We push each other because we know that we can; we’ve always encouraged each other,” Jay said. “So when we come together we ask, ‘What are you doing, how can I help?’"
@jenstden
