Jessica McDonald is not comfortable with this profile.
Nor, likely, with any effort that has tried to pry into her personal life from her time as deputy minister to the premier, cabinet secretary and head of the public service through to today, as president and CEO of BC Hydro. Neither has McDonald been particularly keen on stepping into the personal slights slung at her from Victoria muckrakers.
“I’m a very private person. I’m not interested in the spotlight – I never have been. And I never have taken a position because it had profile. … So, I don’t think people know me very well. In some ways, I sort of think that’s fair enough people will just sort of make their assumptions,” said McDonald. “I don’t spend a lot of time on it because I know what the truth is.”
However, McDonald readily accepts the responsibility to represent the province’s largest Crown corporation and its workforce on the public stage. In fact, McDonald has spent a considerable amount of time in front of the mic since she took the utility’s top post 19 months ago, overseeing what she describes as “a very intensive period of time.”
The idea of a private person occupying a high-profile position is difficult to resolve if you’re a binary thinker.
In McDonald’s world, though, nothing is black and white, only various shades of grey. And on the playing fields of BC Hydro or in the public service, success is defined by pinpointing the sweet spot in the shaded spectrum.
The brokering of interests and finding a common path are critical day to day at BC Hydro, said McDonald
“At the end of the day sometimes choices have to be made, but the most important thing is to ensure you really listened and heard what the interests and opportunities are so that you’re making the best decisions and keeping people onside.”
Keeping things moving is essential, too.
McDonald is at the helm of a historic capital program that is refurbishing and/or expanding existing infrastructure and undertaking new builds.
BC Hydro will spend roughly $25 billion over a 10-year period and approximately $40 billion over a 20-year window. The long to-do list is topped by the controversial but green-lit $9 billion Site C project.
McDonald said her No. 1 focus has been to ensure BC Hydro is foundationally sound to deliver a program of that size, which she compares to bolting on a second company to the utility.
“[We have] highly qualified people inside the organization for managing capital projects, but the scale that we’re entering into really requires a focus on the internal resources and our ability to deliver on a sustained basis – a span with hundreds of capital projects all needing to be managed at one time.”
McDonald has already put her thumbprint on BC Hydro, said Paul Kariya, executive director of Clean Energy BC.
“I’d say that she’s already started down the road changing that organization into something it hasn’t been in a long time. Now, it’s very much a capital-build organization.
“One might say in one sense it didn’t have very much of an identity … in the last couple of administrations,” said Kariya, who also credits McDonald for a memorandum of understanding signed last October that sets out the framework for a successful working relationship between the utility, the province and his association.
McDonald made her mark just as quick moving up the ranks of the B.C. public service, earning praise for her work ethic and intelligence.
But rather than seeing her as a bright light on the fast track, some have cast shadows on her appointment as head of the B.C. public service.
In turn, McDonald went on to effectively manage the civil service’s 36,000 employees along with its $40 billion-plus annual budget.
Later this month, John Dyble will retire from McDonald’s old top-civil-servant job. News coverage commended Dyble for running a well-functioning bureaucracy and doing a job that “straddles the world between the non-partisan civil service and the hyper-partisan premier’s office.”
However, when McDonald was appointed to BC Hydro, NDP opposition leader John Horgan criticized the former head of the BC Public Service Agency as being a “Liberal partisan” – implying that she was not a bridge, but biased and influenced after her time working with then-premier Gordon Campbell.
Questioning people’s integrity undermines both their professional and personal reputation. McDonald welcomes the opportunity to address whether her job at BC Hydro came with any political strings attached.
“I served in many different capacities under many different premiers through the 1990s and then, of course, in the 2000s. I feel fortunate to have had the range of opportunities to work on many different policy priorities for so many different governments,” she said. “I don’t identify myself with a political party. I have never been a member of a political party. And I recognize the role that I can serve within public administration in B.C. and have always been on the side of public service.”
One of McDonald’s career-defining moments in public service was as co-author of the “New Relationship,” a landmark agreement between the province and First Nations. Concentrating on relationships with First Nations, as well as the clean-energy sector and other system stakeholders, is another of McDonald’s key focus areas.
Kim Baird, former chief of Tsawwassen First Nation and BC Hydro board member, said McDonald helps bring both sides of the table together.
“When you work with her you realize how collaborative she can be. If there is any common ground to build, she certainly is really good at finding it and bridging with it. I found her exceptionally supportive of other leaders as well. I think she is an extremely impressive woman on every level,” said Baird, who currently sits on the utility’s Strategic Aboriginal Engagement Committee.
McDonald is hard-wired to take on big challenges made up of many moving parts, multiple stakeholders and interests, and material decisions. At home, McDonald’s mantra to her daughter Charlotte is: “Anything is possible. There are absolutely no barriers.”
BC Hydro is a blend of business and government servant – a policy fulfilment tool. Some say a few of her predecessors, who left amid some controversy, lacked the deep and nuanced understanding of how government behaves. However, McDonald already knew the operating manual to govern a Crown corporation. Leading BC Hydro is a careful balance between running a business and appeasing its major shareholder – the province – which also represents its customers, she said.
“It can be complex to manage, if I can call it, multiple bottom lines. If you don’t have a strong understanding of how government works, how decisions are made, how policies are developed and what the opportunities are to share key business information, it would be a very challenging endeavour to manage a large Crown corporation like this.”
Geoff Plant, who worked with McDonald when she was deputy minister and later consultant at Heenan Blaikie, calls McDonald a “significant force.”
“She thinks the hardest problems are solvable and all that is required is a little more energy, a little more collective creative thinking,” said Plant. “I think she gravitates naturally to harder problems because they’re more interesting. You want to bore her? Give her an easy problem.”
After 19 months in office, McDonald is more energized than antagonized by well-publicized ongoing opposition to Site C, extraordinary storm outages and IT issues she has faced.
“I think it comes down to the fact that challenge is the greatest opportunity – it’s the most rewarding thing. Whether it’s working in B.C. public service or here at BC Hydro, the inspiration is that everything you do matters. It has immediate meaning,” said McDonald. “At the end of the day, for the province of British Columbia, this is a critical time for its largest Crown corporation, and I want to work with this team here.”
