Remarks From BCBC’s New Board Chair

The following are remarks made by BCBC’s new Board Chair, Ryan Peterson, at the 60th AGM hosted on May 27, 2026.

I'll be honest about why I'm here. I took this on because I believe British Columbia holds one of the best economic hands in the world — and we haven't been playing it well. That gap is what drew me to BCBC, and closing it is what I'll spend my time on as Chair.

Here's the backdrop I can't stop thinking about. Technology is moving faster than at any point in our lifetimes. Artificial intelligence is reshaping how work gets done, how companies compete, how whole economies grow — and it's happening at the speed of light. This may be the most consequential moment for productivity in a hundred years.

This isn't the first time we've stood here. Sixty years ago — the year before this Council was founded — a researcher named Gordon Moore looked at the early integrated circuit and predicted that the number of transistors on a single chip would keep doubling, year after year. The places that saw what that curve meant — that organized their talent, their capital, and their policy around it — built the industries that defined the next half-century. The places that treated it as someone else's story got left behind.

We're standing at the front of a curve like that again. And the question for British Columbia is the same one it faced in 1966: do we shape the change, or does the change happen to us?

So as we mark our 60th anniversary, I'm less interested in looking back than in what we build next. My goal as Chair is to make British Columbia the best place in the world for companies to build, scale, and stay. Not the cheapest. Not the easiest. The best. And not just in the country — in the world.

That starts with certainty. Investors, builders, and entrepreneurs need to know that when they commit to BC, the rules won't shift under their feet. Everything else is built on that.

The good news is we have the ingredients — and many of the people who can deliver them are in this room. Clean power. Critical minerals. A Pacific gateway few places can match. A workforce that can compete with anyone. Those are real advantages — but they don't become prosperity on their own. That's the work, and it's why I started Project Productivity — my push to put productivity at the centre of the conversation — and what I intend to carry forward here.

Now — let me talk about the Canucks for a minute.

We all know the feeling of watching a team with real talent that just isn't winning. We had the Sedins. We had Miller. We had Hughes. But one star — even a few — doesn't win a championship. And right now, BC's economy feels a little like that. We point to the wins — an LNG project approved here, a big investment announced there — and hope it's enough to turn the season around. It isn't.

What wins is a full team. The right energy policy, the right tax treatment, the right talent pipeline, permitting that moves at the speed of global capital — all of it on the ice at once, all of it pulling the same direction. And here's the part we can't dodge: some of those players sit in Victoria, and some sit in Ottawa. The rules that decide whether a company builds here or leaves get written in both capitals. So that's where we need to be — in both — making sure they line up. Because our real competition was never Calgary or Toronto. It's the rest of the world.

Let me say plainly what I think this Council's job is now. This province has never been short of critique. What we've been short of is solutions — specific, on the table, ready to act on. That's the shift I want to lead. Less diagnosing the problem, more putting forward the answer — and then pushing, together, until it's done. A rebuild takes more than one season. But you don't win the Cup by waiting. You win it by starting now.

I also intend to have some fun with this. We face serious challenges, but we can meet them with creativity — and we have the team to do it. That's thanks to Lisa, who championed the push, and Laura, who built it: a marketing and communications operation most organizations our size would envy. We saw what it can do in 2025, when BCBC answered the Alberta–Ottawa MOU with a three-word press release — bold, simple, impossible to ignore. Nearly a million views. That's the sweet spot: serious, evidence-based policy delivered with communications that land. And we'll practice the productivity we preach — using every tool we have, AI included, to make this Council faster and sharper.

So here's what I'll ask of you. Bring us the problems worth solving. Bring us your ambition. And then let's get to work — because the rest of the world isn't waiting, and neither should we.

Thank you.