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Board Highlights
Diane Mehagan
Diane Mehagan is a Wealth Advisor and Financial Planner with BMO Nesbitt Burns, with over 37 years experience in the financial services industry with the BMO Group of Companies. Diane provides her clients with a distinctive approach to managing their wealth. She specializes in providing Wealth Advisory Services to her clients by partnering with them to create and implement a comprehensive wealth strategy. It is the formation of this strategy which enables her clients to move forward and take advantage of life’s challenges and opportunities.
Diane has been an active member of the Thunder Bay Chamber of Commerce and is in her forth year as a Board Director. She is in her second year serving as Chair of the Thunder Bay Business Awards Committee and was previously a member of the Finance Committee. Diane is very supportive of the Thunder Bay Chamber of Commerce and takes every opportunity to share her optimistic views of the city’s future. She recognizes the importance of job creation and retention and is enthusiastic about the ongoing transformation of Thunder Bay’s existing industries as well as Thunder Bay’s new and emerging industries.
Diane strongly believes that the upcoming changes to the 2010 Thunder Bay Business Awards to include non-member businesses will help enhance the Chamber’s visibility and allow the entire community to see the
Chamber as the voice for all businesses in our community.
Diane C. Mehagan
Wealth Advisor and Financial Planner
BMO Nesbitt Burns
Phone: 807.343.1906
Email: diane.mehagan@nbpcd.com
Bryan MacKay
Bryan has been serving on the Thunder Bay Chamber Board of Directors for the past 4 years and has served on several Chamber committees over the past 8 years including the Small Business Development Committee and Education Committee and Marketing and Membership Committee.
He has been designing and teaching courses on business marketing, management and entrepreneurship at Confederation College for over 20 years and is passionate about businesses development and entrepreneurship in Thunder Bay. Bryan was the coordinator of Confederation College’s Entrepreneurship Program where he had the opportunity to help students start their own businesses in Thunder Bay and Northwestern Ontario.
He is active in supporting the advancement of young entrepreneurs in our community and serves on the loan approval committee for the Canadian Youth Business Foundation and supports the Summer Company self-employment program for youth, by being a resource for the students and the Thunder Bay Entrepreneur Centre.
Bryan has over 15 years of retail management experience and understands the challenges of business ownership having owned and operated his own retail and service businesses. Bryan believes that opportunities exist for the advancement of businesses in Thunder Bay and that the Thunder Bay Chamber Commerce can support that advancement through its advocacy, communication, education and networking initiatives.
“We must continue to evaluate the needs of our members and respond by offering services that help them sustain and grow”.
Colin Bruce
Over the course of the past 16 years as publisher of The Chronicle-Journal, I have been fortunate to see the many sides of our city. I have been able to walk behind the scenes and begin to understand how things work, how plans come together and how we as a community get things done. It all reminds me of the question of how do you eat an elephant. Well, one bite at a time.
Thunder Bay has been facing very significant challenges in these past five to 10 years but there is no “give-up” in our city. No matter how high the wall or how deep the divide is between opinions, we know how to take one step at a time to build bridges and consensus. I have seen this happen many times during my volunteer relationships with Rotary, The United Way, The Ambassadors, The Chamber of Commerce and Lakehead University. Serving on the boards of each of these organizations, I feel more than fortunate to have brought my wife Grace and two sons Jonathan and David here to make our home.
I have been a career journalist with the Thomson Corp. starting as a copy boy, the most insignificant life form in the newspaper food chain in 1971. With no post secondary training, I knew I just had to work harder than the rest. Now as publisher one of the former Thomson Corp’s largest daily newspapers, it is a proof that I and Thunder Bay have much in common. We share the thought of Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock. He said he was a great believer in luck and the harder he worked, the more luck he seemed to have.
Our chamber is taking and must continue to take a lead role in this philosophy. We believe in working hard and working smart to make sure our community receives the recognition and growth it deserves. We play multiple roles of serving our members, educating the community and lobbying senior governments on behalf of the city. Each of these principle areas of activity are crucial to the chamber today and will continue to be crucial tomorrow.
We now embark on a new era with a soon-to-be-named president. Your board is dedicated to the notion that this person will be a champion not only for our members but will speak with passion to develop the vitality of our city’s business environment.
Colin Bruce, Publisher and general manager
The Chronicle-Journal
75 S. Cumberland Street, Thunder Bay, ON P7B 1A3
Phone: 807-343-6201; Cell 807-627-6626; Fax 807-343-2914
Email: cbruce@chroniclejournal.com
Website: www.chroniclejournal.com
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