Exclusive: Westbank CEO on Oakridge, data centres, and recent lawsuits and disputes

Long before the recent lawsuits, Westbank attracted plenty of controversy.

In a 2019 profile of Gillespie, Bloomberg News journalist Natalie Obiko Pearson, who has reported from more than 20 countries around the world, described Gillespie as “the most vilified developer in Vancouver — a city with a particular disdain for real estate moguls.”

Asked this week if he believes his company has received an undue share of criticism, Gillespie attributed part of it to the high-profile nature of Westbank’s projects.

Many Westbank projects have been described with superlatives. In 1996, the Residences on Georgia were marketed as “the most technologically advanced homes in the world,” and described by the press as the largest single-phase development in Canada.

When Telus Garden was completed downtown in n 2015, it was hailed as Canada’s highest-scoring office building for energy efficiency.

The Fairmont Pacific Rim set Canadian condo price records.

When construction was getting underway at Sen̓áḵw in 2022, then prime minister Justin Trudeau hailed it as ”the largest First Nations economic partnership in Canadian history.”

Westbank’s recent projects were under construction at a time when “the market was really frothy,” with the cost of pouring a cubic yard of concrete, as an example, surging quickly, he said.

“So there’s a lot of pigs at the trough, so it goes like this,” he said gesturing with his hand like a steeply rising line on a graph, “and then it goes like this,” motioning back down to earth.

“It’s like, ‘Well, OK, guys, you had it really good, you all made a killing, and the project ends up a year behind schedule, now I want you to share some of the pain with me that it’s a year behind schedule,” he said. “My point being, if I decide to get into a disagreement with a subtrade because I don’t want to pay them what they want to be paid, that’s different than saying there’s a systemic problem on that project.”

Asked why these broader industry changes haven’t led to as many liens, lawsuits and disputes hitting Vancouver’s other large, established development companies, Gillespie said: “I don’t know. … I don’t talk to anybody in my industry — I mean, I know them, but we don’t interact.”

Gillespie and Westbank have kept a distance from most of their industry peers for many years. Unlike other big Vancouver real estate companies, Westbank doesn’t belong to the industry’s main lobbying group, the Urban Development Institute nor does Westbank attend its events.

So, in 2013, Gillespie bought a company called Central Heat Distribution for a reported $32 million. It had been in operation since the 1960s and provided steam heat to about 210 buildings in downtown Vancouver. Central Heat was rebranded as Creative Energy, and Gillespie had visions of expanding it to include many more buildings and helping Vancouver transition to low-carbon heat as an alternative to individual gas-powered boilers in buildings.

He fast-forwarded to this month’s big data centre announcement.

Most other data centres run on fossil fuels and are in rural areas where they emit heat into the atmosphere, he said. But Vancouver’s new data centre, which will be placed on top of, and hooked into, the Creative Energy system at Beatty and West Georgia, will heat commercial buildings downtown and roughly 150,000 homes, said Gillespie. Every electron that goes into the data centre will be used twice, he explained, once to power the data centre, and then to heat buildings.

Data centres have been controversial for their environmental impacts. While some aim for net-zero designation, meaning they offset the total amount of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere with the amount removed, Gillespie predicts Vancouver’s new data centres will be the first net-positive ones in the world.