Virginia Greene: The Making of a Candidate
From helping lead Expo ’86 to starting Go Direct Marketing, Virginia Greene has made a career out of big audacious wins. She’s now rolling the dice one more time.
Virginia Greene, Liberal candidate in Vancouver-Fairview, is knocking on a door. It’s a task long
associated with snake oil salesmen and Jehovah’s Witnesses and, indeed, don’t we include politicians in that category? Don’t we look startled by that rapping sound? She holds a brochure with a black and white photo of her beaming face on the front cover. It doesn’t portray her dramatic auburn hair or the shock of blonde at her temples. But it still gives a hint of what her daughter Justine describes as Greene’s “persona,” that endless optimism and air of accomplishment that can intimidate those who don’t know her well.
“I’ll leave them with a big smile and a golden decade,” she says when she gets no answer, making a bit of a crack at the slogan printed under her face on the brochure. She sets it up neatly on the welcome mat of the townhouse’s front porch, then turns around to admire the warm scent of the bushy winter jasmine.
Virginia Greene is a “star candidate” for the May 17 provincial election, anointed by the premier. She doesn’t have the front-page name recognition of Carole Taylor, ex-CBC chair now running for the Liberals in Vancouver-Langara. But she has a grassroots cachet; if you know her, it’s because you’ve met her. She has had two significant careers, one as a senior bureaucrat in the provincial government and one as an owner of a successful company called Go Direct Marketing. She has also made an enormous contribution in the not-for-profit world, leading the B.C./Yukon chapter of the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation and sitting on so many community boards that a common joke among her colleagues is that everyone in Vancouver is somehow linked
to Virginia.
Having sold her company to J. Walter Thompson Advertising of London in 2000, she had countless options, including a very comfortable retirement. So why would she choose to jump into such an uncertain forum, where she is open to constant criticism, scrutiny and questions about her integrity and motives? Where the first exercise is interrupting someone’s quiet afternoon?
The first time I meet Greene is in early January at the Gastown offices of the Pace Group, a communications firm whose managing partner, Norman Stowe, is working for her campaign. She’s wearing a black suit but she still makes a personal statement with a dash of white lace under the jacket and her trademark fishnet stockings. On the table is a recent clipping from the Vancouver Sun, a profile of Gregor Robertson, the Happy Planet juice man running for the NDP in her riding. She points out their similarities: they’re business people, they’re from well-established B.C. families and they both have roots in the riding. “Nice guy,” she muses. “Wrong party.”
Stowe, mustached and perpetually suited, worked on his first campaign at age 18 for
a federal Conservative candidate. Today he is as excited as I can imagine him getting. He expounds, over and over, on the same theme. “Just look at the resumé and stack it up against anybody’s! She’s done it all. She puts the boots to the myth that if you’re in business you can’t have a heart.”
Along with her public, private and non-profit experience, Greene sat until recently on the boards of both the Vancouver International Film Festival and a government organization called the Community Achievement Foundation. She was also chief judge of the Jack Webster Journalism Awards. But Stowe also raves about Greene’s eclectic group of supporters, collected over years of indulging diverse interests. She even takes singing lessons, he marvels. “If you look at my friends, they’re all pretty much like me,” Stowe says. “If you look at Virginia’s friends, they’re like a rainbow of stuff. You’ve got all the business types. Then she’s got all these soft, left-of-centre people that I don’t know very much about from the arts community. Somebody will say, ‘Who are some of the people getting involved?’ and I’ll say, ‘Well, they’re the kind of hipsters.’”
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