Karin Wilson

Contributor

There’s a cow in Paul Mitchell’s top floor office, and she stops me in my tracks.

I don’t know what her name is, but I recognize her.

American pop artist Roy Lichtenstein plucked the bovine image from his imagination, plunked her down on a cadmium yellow field and then proceeded to deconstruct her. The resulting triptych would become one of his most famous works—Cow Going Abstract.

“It’s just a paper version,” Mitchell assures me, but I know it means more to him than the paper it’s printed on.

A self-described Lichtenstein aficionado, Mitchell keeps a hefty coffee-table volume of this master’s works in his office at Pushor Mitchell.

A lawyer by profession, Mitchell’s an art collector at heart, spending his off hours immersed in that world.

He spent the previous night glued to his computer watching the Heffel Gallery auction online from the Vancouver Convention Centre, where Emily Carr’s Wind in the Tree Tops sold for a record $2.1 million.

“I spend a lot of time reading art books, studying art, collecting art,” he shyly admits, saying he is currently immersed in the book Seven Days In The Art World.

My eyes roam from the single cow to the two other panels of this triptyh.

It takes a while before I see the pattern—the way Lichtenstein isolates pieces of the cow to recreate it in another form.

It’s the elemental movement from one to the next that captivates me. It all looks so simple, but my gut tells me it’s anything but.

And that’s why I’m here. Mitchell is just coming off his own triptych of success.

First, he played an instrumental role in bringing the 2004 Memorial Cup to Kelowna, then he followed that up with the successful landing of UBC Okanagan, and only last month wrapped it all up chairing the committee that helped land Steve Thomson a cabinet post as B.C.’s new Minister of Agriculture.

I ask Mitchell: Why these projects? “It has to be good for the community somehow, and something that I have a passion about. If you want to do well at anything, you have to have a passion for it.”

Simple as that.

That word “passion” comes up again and again as I try and find the common thread that binds Mitchell’s diverse interests.

He works hard to find others with his same level of commitment to carry projects through, because when times get tough, those without passion walk. Those with passion, forge the way to success.

Rick Pushor, who first met Mitchell many years ago when he was a young articling student at his firm, says his partner has always exhibited drive. But he brings more than that to the table. He brings optimism and devotion.

Now finishing his second year assisting in managing the firm (a job that rotates through the firm’s legal team), Pushor describes his partner as “the biggest cheerleader in the stands.”

“He acknowledges the work that’s being done, he encourages, he doesn’t say very much that’s negative,” Pushor said.

“And if there is a challenge, he finds a way to remove the load and put it on to somebody else—in a nice way without creating animosity. And that’s inspiring.”

It’s like at every step of the way Mitchell is not only moving forward but dissecting the parts and finding innovative ways to put them together to create a new whole.

Especially a whole that elevates the best his hometown—Kelowna—has to offer.

Triptych One:

Knowledge is Strength

Back in the mid-1990s Mitchell and a few others were bemoaning that the Okanagan Valley didn’t seem to have its fair share of people with post-secondary education.

Young people simply couldn’t afford to leave home, and while Okanagan University College served many, Mitchell and others felt the valley deserved a place that offered not only research but the opportunity for graduate degrees.

OU? Oh Yes! was born, with Mitchell taking a key role.

Those efforts started in 1996, and Mitchell was confident the job would be done by 2000.

“But 2000 came and went,” he said.

Firm lines were drawn between those who wanted to transform the existing college into a full-fledged university with its own standing, and those who wanted to create something new.

The battle became bitter and acrimonious.

“Some people on the committee gave up,” Mitchell recalls.

Enter UBC president Martha Piper. Mitchell recalls whisking her in for a high-profile meeting. By 2004, with the help of Premier Gordon Campbell, the job was done.

In making the announcement, Campbell harkened back to the initial reason for the U2000 drive—that the Okanagan had one of the highest Grade 12 completion rates in B.C., yet the number of post-secondary spaces per capita was one-half the provincial average and so was the number of post-secondary graduates.

Today that’s changing.

“It’s fabulous,” Mitchell says. “It turned out better than what I thought.

“It’s been a huge economic stimulus—about $400 million, with a significant cultural impact.

“It’s changed the demographic of the city—we have young people in town now and there’s all kinds of university spinoffs.”

Triptych Two:

Community Matters

While Mitchell was still trying to broker the university deal, Kelowna Rockets president and general manager Bruce Hamilton was on the phone asking for help with another project—for Kelowna to host the Memorial Cup, Canada’s top junior hockey level national championship.

Mitchell knew Hamilton having worked on various legal matters with the team since its arrival.

But he didn’t know a thing about how to put together a bid for a Memorial Cup. Yet, he could sense Hamilton’s passion, could see what it could do for the community.

So without too much arm-twisting, Mitchell said yes to the bid committee chair.

“I thought it was a long-shot,” Mitchell recalls, flipping through the massive four-inch thick binder of material the bid team took 2,000 hours to put together and present to the 20 governors at a high-octane meeting at the Westin Bayshore in Vancouver in the spring of 2002.

“We did dry runs in advance. Everyone was in on it,” Mitchell says.

“There were about 15 or so of us who made the presentation. We each had about two minutes to speak. It went rapid fire. Prospera kicked in the price of the arena, media offered up $500,000 in advertising…we had the Red Surge there, the mayor. Then we had to wait all day to hear.”

They won the bid.

As luck would have it, by 2004 the Memorial Cup was just what a weary community still suffering the aftermaths of the Okanagan Mountain fire needed.

Volunteers swarmed their online website so they had to cut numbers off at 800.

An estimated 1.2-million viewers watched the tournament, where game after game commentators remarked on the sold-out crowds and high spirits.

Mitchell’s innovative formula of including the general community by providing a whopping 30 non-game events (five times as many as any previous Memorial Cup) as part of the tournament has since become a mainstay for subsequent host cities to strive for.

At the time, Lucas Aykroyd wrote in Prospects Hockey: “Like their community, the Rockets were galvanized to pull together, enjoying a remarkable 2003-04 campaign…this has become a community event at every level.”

It didn’t hurt either that the tournament drew those 1.2 million viewers, with nearly half a million watching the final game.

Kelowna was on the map for the second time in less than 12 months —only this time with a massive smile on its collective face.

Triptych Three:

Political kingmaker

One of the first calls Steve Thomson made in the days leading up to his foray into politics was to Paul Mitchell.

Eight months later he would be calling Mitchell again—this time while moving furniture around in his new office in Victoria as B.C.’s Agriculture Minister.

Thomson wanted Mitchell on his team from the start, even though Mitchell had never been involved in a political campaign or seen the inside of a nomination meeting.

“I remember he phoned on a Sunday night…and I said I’d have to think about it. Steve said, ‘I’ve never done this either,’” Mitchell laughs looking back on that conversation.

“I think the best thing about this was the fact it was a new experience for both of us but we made sure it was enjoyable and fun,” Thomson said in an e-mail during a weekend break from Victoria.

“We had a great time doing it and the team had a great time, and (Mitchell) worked tirelessly as we both learned a lot through the experience.

“We made mistakes but never looked back. He has a very positive outlook—I think this reflects his success in the community, his success in business and he was instrumental in our success.”

Successful yes, but not without tension. The flurry of candidates—six in total—put their names forward for the nomination.

There were opportunities to get distracted by political posturing, but Mitchell and his team kept their eye on the prize, cramming so many supporters into the room that it became the largest turnout for a nomination meeting in BC Liberal history—1,539 members.

Thomson won on the first ballot. “It was a steep learning curve —vertical at times,” he says. “After the nomination, now we’re in the campaign. So the Liberals had a weekend retreat for all the campaign managers and all the candidates. It was like getting a fire hose of information stuffed down you. That was a huge learning curve.”

“I know we both had sleepless nights as we headed into the voting processes but his support never wavered,” Thomson says.

“Besides that he provided great tunes on the iPod for the bus ride to Penticton and our campaign events, even though he was not quite as much a fan of country music as I am.”

One panel at a time

Recently, Mitchell sent around a YouTube video to the other lawyers in the firm.

The video was called Risk=Life, and it reveals the tremendous number of failures numerous people endured on their road to success, people like Michael Jordan who was cut from his senior high school basketball team.

“I’ve always been an optimist, I always hope for the best. It’s the old saying: Babe Ruth—he had the most home runs in his time, but he also had the most strike-outs. He was the strike-out king. The essence of success is you’ve got to fail.”

Mitchell insists that without a specific goal in mind, without passion, without the right people on the team, none of this could have happened.

Each member of the team believed in the vision. Each one of them were committed to “win,” not with the idea of someone else being a loser, but with a sense of determination that it could be done.

I ask him if there was a turning point in his life when he decided to look at things differently. An image flashes to his mind like it was yesterday.

“I was unemployed, on UIC, going nowhere,” he says. He was a young man, finished school with “abysmal” grades, and worked when he could in construction in Kelowna.

Then he meets a young woman who asks him what he wants to do with his life. He doesn’t want to answer, almost embarrassed. She presses him.

A lawyer, he says, but that will never happen. “Why don’t you give it a shot,” she says.

He returned to college, allowed only to enter on probationary terms, then went on to UBC, and eventually law school.

Not surprising, Paul eventually married that young woman named Tracy when he was 21 and she 18. They’re still together today.

I don’t think I ever would have done it of my own volition,” he says.

“It was a huge turning point. What it taught me was you need to have faith in yourself, and never give up, and have a goal.

“Life is funny. Sometimes it’s the smallest things that will tweak your rudder. It’s unlikely had she not come along that I would have gone to university.”

Now Mitchell has his eye on his next project—Kelowna Collects.

Targeted to run during the 2010 Olympics, this special exhibition promises to bring the best of Kelowna’s private art collections out of hiding and onto the walls of the Kelowna Art Gallery.

In the book Roy Lichenstein, art publisher Sidney B. Felsen wrote: “Roy made everything look amazingly easy… Roy was no automaton. There was a passion and a glowing interest in everything he did.”

Insert “Paul” at will in Felsen’s summation.

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