Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

Taking care of business

By Michel Beaudry She’s at it again. Organizing events and turning people on to the mountains. It’s the kind of work she thought she’d left behind long ago.

By Michel Beaudry

She’s at it again. Organizing events and turning people on to the mountains. It’s the kind of work she thought she’d left behind long ago. But when the Whistler Film Festival people came calling last fall, Jill Dunnigan couldn’t help herself. Before she knew it, she had volunteered her Extremely Canadian Team to put on the first annual Film Festival Celebrity Race.

And by all accounts it was a raging success. Team Ski Bum, anchored by the inimitable Johnny Thrash, won top honours. And though there was some grumbling by the black-clad celebrity squads from Back East about local ringers, Dunnigan was quick to set them straight. These guys ski for a living,” she told them in her smilingly blunt way. “They should win…”

She laughs when I bring up the subject of event management. “I don’t know what I was thinking,” she admits. “I forgot how painful it is to put something like that together.” She pauses. Titters. “It must be a little like childbirth. The longer it’s been, the less you remember the pain…”

Surrounded by her Extremely Canadian cohorts, Dunnigan is winding down with a celebratory drink (or two) at the GLC after a tough day on the mountain. “We were expecting 50 people for this event,” she says. “And more than 100 showed up. I tell ya — we had to do some quick shuffling. But I think it all turned out pretty well.”

There are few companies in this valley who have successfully partnered up with the powers-that-be at Whistler-Blackcomb — and survived. Most either get swallowed up, marginalized or fall by the wayside. And if you’re in the ski teaching business, forget about it. There are more program carcasses out there than you could count.

But since its inception in 1994, Extremely Canadian — an owner-operated outfit devoted to promoting both the philosophy and leading-edge techniques of big-mountain skiing — has not only survived. It has thrived.

The secret to their success? “I guess it’s a combination of things,” Jill explains. “A lot of humour, a strong dash of passion and a great deal of persistence. And making sure that everyone who works with us reflects those qualities. From the very beginning we were fortunate to attract some great people to work in our programs — people like Wendy Brookbank and Mike Dobbin and Chris Winter and Chris Eby. They kept the fun factor really high for our guests.”

But there is more to the Extremely Canadian story than simply hiring good staff. For though it was the company’s male partners — Peter Smart and Greg Dobbin — who always ensured that their clients’ skiing experiences was of the highest calibre, it was Dunnigan’s organizational know-how and iron will that kept the company financially solvent.

Jill was born in Edmonton, but grew up on Vancouver Island, in Nanaimo. “We skied at a little hill called Green Mountain,” she recounts. “I wonder if anybody remembers that place.” She smiles. “Skiing was my dad’s passion. It was the family sport. It’s what we did together.”

There were only two rules: “No whining. And you had to carry all your own gear,” she says. “And every year, we got to go to Whistler for two weeks and stay at my uncle’s cabin at Emerald.”

Because she’d never spent any time back East, Jill decided to pursue her post-secondary studies at the University of Western Ontario. “It was a real culture shock,” she remembers of her arrival in London in 1988. “The people were so different.” She laughs. “There weren’t many preppies in Nanaimo at the time. And here I was, surrounded by them…”

But she stuck it out and came home with a degree in sociology — “which made me more sociable I guess,” she says with another laugh. “The plan was to go back to school, get my dentist’s credentials and eventually take over my dad’s practice.” But her years in Ontario had left her unprepared for Vancouver Island’s wet weather. “I couldn’t get used to the rain again.” She explains. “That’s when I decided to spend one last season at Whistler before knuckling down and becoming a dentist.”

Like so many other Whistlerites, that innocent little decision led to a life change of epic proportions. “I met Pete (Smart) in the winter of 1993. We were at Tommy Africa’s and everybody was partying pretty hard. As I was walking across the dance floor, some guy grabbed me by the hair and yanked me from behind.” She pauses. Smiles at the memory. “I asked him three times to let go of me,” she says. “And when he didn’t, I whacked him across the head.”

Stunned by the blow, the guy finally let go. But he continued to pester Jill. “That’s when Pete got involved,” she says. “He’d been watching the whole thing go down. So he came over and asked me if I needed help.” Another snigger. “By this point I’m finding the whole thing pretty funny. Here I’ve got this big local guy in my corner — and he’s really cute. So I let him walk me home and we ended up flirting with each other for the next three months.”

Still intent on following her original plan, Jill moved back to Nanaimo in May. But the die had already been cast. Jill and Pete were in love. “I was all set to go back to my old boyfriend on the Island,” she explains. “But it was too late. My family had already decided that Pete was going to become my life partner…”

She lasted two days at Malaspina College before caving in to the inevitable. That next winter, Pete, Jill and a ski-racing friend of Pete’s from Montreal, Greg Dobbin, launched Extremely Canadian. “And we never looked back,” says Jill with a canary-eating smile. “In those days, there were dozens of independent ski camps operating here. After all, Whistler and Blackcomb were each looking to establish a competitive advantage over the other. So when the two mountains merged in 1997, it was a big surprise to us to discover that we were the only independent company retained.”

And the company continued to grow. From running high-end ski clinics, Extremely Canadian expanded into the adventure travel world. “We took our first group of skiing clients to Switzerland, to a little mountain town of Champery where a friend of ours, Andy McMillan, ran a chalet business. After staying there for a couple of nights, we realized that this was exactly what Whistler needed...”

The Extremely Canadian Lodge opened for business in the winter of 2000. “I still can’t believe how much support we got from the local big-mountain community,” says Jill. “Just before we opened we had a work party at the lodge and everybody from Jeff Holden to Hugo Harrison to Big Air Dan Treadway showed up to lend a hand…”

She’s too tough a gal to fall prey to sentimental nostalgia about “the old days”, but she does acknowledge that those years were very special ones for her. “That’s because all our friends and colleagues were still living at Whistler. We hadn’t yet been scattered to the four winds…”

Pete and Jill reluctantly sold the lodge last year and moved down to Squamish. “We just weren’t having fun anymore with it,” she explains. “You don’t get rich running a chalet business, and the financial pressures were really getting us down. We thought — as long as we can still be skiing on the mountain, as long as we can stay happy and relaxed about life, that’s all that counts.”

She says she loves her new life in Squamish. Loves her half-acre lot and single family home and the financial freedom it’s provided them. Still, she’s sorry she had to leave Whistler. “I still own a business here. I still consider myself a Whistlerite. But we just couldn’t afford to own property here.”

And that, she says, is the sad reality for a growing number of her peers. “I look at my staff and most of them are between 25 and 35. There’s a lost generation here. They don’t have a community to connect with anymore.”

She sighs. “As a community, Whistler is not giving young people a compelling enough reason to stay. There’s a kind of take-it-or-leave-it attitude now.” And that attitude, she says, will lead to dire consequences in the future. “The spirit that was here in the mid ’90s — the can-do attitude that made so many great things happen — is fast disappearing. So what will Whistler become when young people don’t live here anymore?”

Jill and Pete were in their early 20s when they launched Extremely Canadian and helped brand Whistler as one of the great big-mountain skiing mecca’s of the world. Would something like that be possible today, I ask. “Highly improbable,” she says sadly…