Former Winnipeg mayor's new gig: Ensuring insurer is socially responsible
CBC
As the mayor of Winnipeg for eight years, Brian Bowman spent his days trying to manage competing priorities.
The new job he starts Monday will feature more of the same: Balancing the age-old investor demand for profit with an increasing corporate emphasis on social responsibility.
The former politician has joined Winnipeg-based Canada Life as its new vice president in charge of sustainability and social impact.
The job involves ensuring the global insurer complies with the growing expectation that corporations conduct business in a manner that minimizes their impact on the environment and improves society, while they also happen to make money.
"The bottom line needs to be maintained, but what's been communicated to me at Canada Life is they want to do the right things [and] they want to do them in the right way," Bowman said Sunday in an interview.
"This is an organization that's been around for more than 175 years and they've done so by helping build communities."
Bowman said his new gig entails three main roles. One is to ensure Canada Life is more sustainable and socially responsible.
Another is to advance reconciliation in Canada and work on similar decolonization efforts in the United States and Europe, where the company also conducts business.
Bowman's third role will involve building partnerships within those communities. While his work as mayor gave him a background for all three tasks, doing the work in Denver, Dublin and Cologne as well as Winnipeg presents new challenges for the former mayor.
"The global aspect of this job is something that really, really appealed to me. Just the learning curve, I think will be quite steep when you're talking about the experiences in some of these issues in places like Ireland and Germany and in the United States," Bowman said.
An official at Canada Life declined comment on the hire, deferring instead to the former mayor.
Bowman acknowledged there was widespread speculation in Winnipeg he would end up in another political role after he left the mayor's office. Rumours swirled at city hall about political appointments during the two years after he provided notice he did not intend to serve a third term as mayor.
Politics, he said, does not hold further interest for him.
"I was in the best political position I could imagine, serving as mayor," he said.