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Uncle Joe and the Intrawest Myth

Because of the sensitive nature of this column, most people who are quoted below requested that their names be withheld. I have respected their wishes.

Because of the sensitive nature of this column, most people who are quoted below requested that their names be withheld. I have respected their wishes. But I do encourage them to stand up and speak out soon!

The money-seekers certainly won this round. And what an easy round it was for them to win. Barely had I put the finishing touches to my story on W-B COO Dave Brownlie last week when a piece came out in the Vancouver Sun claiming that his boss, Intrawest Capo Joe Houssian, would be netting over $126 million from the Fortress buy-out. One-hundred-and-twenty-six million semolians! No, I didn’t get it wrong. That wasn’t the company’s profit. That was Joe’s personal cut. All his. As the Sun’s 40-point type asserted: “Intrawest sale worth a fortune to executives”.

Fortune indeed. Given that the Whistler-Blackcomb property has been estimated to represent roughly a third of the deal’s overall value (give or take a few million), one could then posit that Joe did very well from the ski business here. And that begs a few questions:

Will we ever see Joe at a ski resort again? Will he ever spend some of that hard-earned cash on the slopes? Who knows? But then Joe’s never been much of a Snow-eater. I think he was in it mostly for the money.

And he certainly succeeded there. Especially considering how badly the Intrawest ship had been listing of late. Reality could no longer sustain the company’s rhetoric in recent years. Debt was rising way too fast. “Too many chiefs. Too many agendas,” opined a long-time insider. Everyone in the business talked about it — the Intrawest vision was no longer workable (if it ever was in the first place). And yet here was Joe brokering a deal that still has most experts shaking their heads in wonder. “He was brilliant,” says a former business associate. “For years, he managed to pit his top managers against each other in a fierce contest to see who could most raise the value of the company. And then, just as his house of cards was about to topple and crash, he sold it and walked away with all the chips. As I said: Brilliant.”

So what about the guys and gals left behind? What about the vaunted Intrawest team spirit? How does that play in the overall story? “I’m mad as hell,” said a highly-placed senior team member who is scrambling to craft an exit strategy now that he finds himself without a team to belong to. “I feel totally betrayed. I’ve given nearly half of my life to this company. Done all I possibly could to make it successful. And this is what I get in return?”

To add insult to injury, he told me he’d recently received a memo from Joe directing members of the senior management team to encourage their employees to celebrate the company’s success. “What company?” he asked me. “What success? It’s all in Joe’s pockets…”

Sounds to me like the empire is beginning to crumble…

I never really bought into the Intrawest “vision”. Whistler I did, for sure. The town, the mountains — this kooky semi-eccentric community of dreamers and adventurers — those were my touchstones. That’s what made this place real for me. I was proud of Whistler. Proud of its unique culture. But the Intrawest “We Will Rule The World” mindset was so far from the vision of mountain tourism that I’d grown up with that I could never understand its appeal.

After all, why would you ever want to stay in a condo at Squaw Valley that was designed exactly the same as one in Whistler’s Creekside? I mean, isn’t one of the charms of mountain travel to celebrate the different cultures found in the global high country? Isn’t that diversity part of the magic?

When Intrawest bought Whistler Mountain I mourned. Sure Whistler’s management had always been a bit suspect — and not always the most progressive — but the owners were family. They were Snow-eaters. The Intrawest guys were different. For all their talk of understanding snow culture, it was soon apparent that making deals was way more important to head office than making turns.

All you had to do was contrast their posh downtown digs in Vancouver to the gerbil-cage décor of Blackcomb’s Administration Building to understand what the company was really all about…

But there was no stopping them now. Slowly but surely, the Intrawest machine began to steamroll over hearts and minds across snow country. Bigger was always better. Shareholder value was way more important than customer satisfaction. If 10,000 people on the mountain was good for the bottom line, then there had to be a way of getting 20,000 up there. And what about 30,000? Surely that was even better. Intrawest-branded villages began to pop up around the country like mushrooms on a cow pie. Everything was calculated for maximum profit. Nothing was left to serendipity. Yet even there, the myth was far bigger than the reality. And Joe’s lieutenants milked the misconceptions for all they were worth.

Did you know that Whistler was created by Intrawest? Forget Al Raine and Garry Watson and former mayor Pat Carleton. And don’t even think of Franz Wilhelmsen or Glen McPherson or any of the other early pioneers. Ask anybody who has ever done business with Intrawest (particularly Americans), and they’ll swear up and down that it was Houssian and his crew who put this place together. “It’s not like we lied about it,” says a former real estate executive with the company. “It’s just that we never corrected people who made that assumption. And it definitely worked in our favour — particularly when we first broke into the U.S. market. Whistler was hot. We were hot by association. We landed a lot of projects by insinuation.”

Which brings me around to the reason I started writing this column in the first place. Whistler has a story. In fact, Whistler has a lot of stories. It’s Toad Hall and the Peak-to-Valley race and the Westside Road and Alta Lake and the bears in summer and the May Day pig roast and the pakalolo and Cheakamus Challenge and the nose-deep powder and Singing Pass and the ocean down the highway. It’s Toulouse Spence and Rob Boyd and Sara Jennings and Claire Daniels and Feet Banks and Seppo Makkinen and Ken Achenbach and Andree Janyk and Mario Enero — and yes, even Dave Brownlie and his young family. It’s you and me and everybody who ever woke up in this valley and couldn’t believe how lucky they were to be living here in the first place — if only for a moment in time.

These are the stories we should be celebrating. These are the stories we should be telling newcomers to town. Proudly. With smiles and laughter and generosity. The story of Whistler isn’t the story of condo sales and 2.2 million visitors a year. It’s not about the Starbucks or the Gap or the increasing shopping mall feel of the village. And it’s certainly not about Joe Houssian’s $126 million. It’s about Bob Dufour helping people onto the gondola on a busy Sunday morning. It’s Cathy Jewett comforting a frightened child while attending to his wounds on the side of the hill. It’s Stu Osborne getting excited about a new on-mountain installation. Or Mike Varrin greeting you like a long lost friend at the GLC. Keep in mind: most of the people working in the trenches at Whistler-Blackcomb have little in common with the “suits” making decisions in Vancouver…

For two decades, Intrawest has had us under its spell. I don’t know why — maybe it’s our passive Canadian nature, maybe it’s just our laid-back style — but we let Joe and his boys define how the rest of the world would eventually come to perceive this place called Whistler. Almost by default, the Intrawest story became the Whistler story. Our dreams, our adventures, our innovations — they all ultimately drove up share value. Joe and his lieutenants would point to Whistler and say: See — aren’t we clever? We can take a stormy, rainy Coast Mountain resort and make it into a global player. We can make people pay exorbitant amounts of money to buy homes here — sight unseen! It’s not Whistler that’s special. It’s us. Now, how much do you want to invest in our dream?

Come Oct. 9th, Intrawest will be no more. A 20-year chapter in the Whistler story is over. And I for one, won’t mourn its passing. For the sale of Intrawest — while introducing a level of uncertainty to this valley that few people have yet adequately digested — also provides an opportunity for Whistlerites to regain control of their core story.

Who are we? What do we stand for? What do we dream about? What do we want from life? What does it really mean to be a Whistlerite? Over the next few months, I plan to ask these question to as many people as I can. And you should too! Get out there. Talk with your neighbours. Find out what you have in common. Discover what you will — and won’t — fight for. But for Whistler’s sake, let’s make sure the next big talker to come knocking — whether that’s Fortress or VANOC or NBC or the IOC — isn’t given the means to hijack our story ever again. The empire is dead! Long live the people!