From corporate lawyer to political staffer to port CEO, Karen Oldfield has made a career of surpassing expectations. Can she do it again in her current role with the Nova Scotia Health Authority?

 

Karen Oldfield wasn’t sitting by the phone waiting for the call. Certainly not for this call.

“Hi, it’s Tim Houston.”

That’s not to suggest Oldfield wasn’t waiting for a call.

It was the morning of Tuesday, August 17, 2021, and Nova Scotians were heading to the polls to choose which political party they wanted to lead them into a still uncertain but longed-for post-COVID future.

Tim Houston hoped Nova Scotians would make him premier.

Karen Oldfield… well, she was between engagements.

After 17 years piloting the Halifax Port Authority—despite tripling port revenues, establishing new markets and shifting the port’s container business focus from Europe to southeast Asia, not to forget transforming abandoned waterfront warehouses into a new Seaport retail district, creating a walkable tourist friendly harbourside boardwalk and establishing a cruise ship pavilion—the port authority’s board of directors decided not to renew her contract as its CEO in 2019.

The port authority board, you should know, is an odd political/apolitical mash-up. The federal, provincial and municipal governments each appoint one director to the board of the agency that oversees and promotes Halifax’s port. Ottawa then gets to name the final four directors, but—and this is where it gets complicated—those directors are supposed to be “nominated by the minister in consultation with users selected by the minister or the classes of users.”

It’s not supposed to be political, but of course it is. Very.

Oldfield herself had become CEO after a two-and-a-half-year stint as chief of staff to Nova Scotia’s Progressive Conservative Premier, John Hamm. Ever since Justin Trudeau’s federal Liberals formed the government in 2015, there were rumours they wanted to “go in a different direction.” In 2019, they did.

“What did that feel like?” I ask Oldfield.

“To have to be… to be retired?” she replies.

“Yes, and at a young age,” I suggest. Oldfield is not yet 60, and she had occupied the same position for close to half her working life.

“At a young age,” she repeats, considers. “Well, of course, it was great to have worked very hard for a long period of time, and then all of a sudden to have an opportunity to just refocus and take a few steps back, do some of the things that I wanted to do, do a little bit of traveling, some self-reflection, get in shape, all of that.”

By the summer of 2021, however, she had done “all of that.” When the pandemic played havoc with her see-the-world itinerary—she’d just returned to Nova Scotia from a late January 2020 ski trip in Alberta and was gearing up to spend May in Greece with her husband when the world shuttered—she says “that just gave me the opportunity to do other things.”

Early retirement, she admits, is not without its perks. “I could’ve stayed on the golf course. That’s what I was doing every day, having fun playing golf.”

But she was also keen to get back to work. In the winter of 2021, there were reports she’d applied for the CEO’s job at the Atlantic Lottery Corporation, but that position went to an insider who’d been its interim head.

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