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For someone who is heralded as a brilliant motivator and mentor, who broke down barriers in BC’s civil service as deputy finance minister, who led Canada’s biggest credit union through a recession, then took the reins of the Vancouver International Airport (YVR) right before a global pandemic fell like a heavy, wet curtain, it is surprising to learn that Tamara Vrooman did not always have a knack for numbers. That skill came later.

“I actually always had a way with words, and to me math is just a language. It’s actually the universal language because it’s one that we can all speak. It’s got component parts, it goes together, you make things.”

Speaking from her office at YVR, where she serves as President and CEO, Vrooman says once she realized math was “really just a language,” it opened up a whole new world.

That world has been expansive. Vrooman earned two history degrees at UVic, a BA in 1991 and an MA in 1995, an experience she loved, then entered the work force in the civil service. Finding her career track stalled, she returned to UVic to sharpen her skills in math and statistics. After that, there was no stopping her ascent, which former colleague Carole Taylor described as “meteoric” in the nomination for Vrooman’s Distinguished Alumni Award, which she received in 2011.

In supporting the nomination, Taylor wrote that Vrooman’s academic background in history “provided her with a unique perspective on dealing with issues of policy and financial affairs; [she] is able to look beyond the numbers.”

When Taylor was BC’s finance minister from 2004 to 2007, Vrooman served as her deputy finance minister, the first female to hold the position and the first to take maternity leave. Vrooman was aware of these ceilings, but says her approach was to do what she could to eliminate them and hopefully clear a path for those who followed.

“I was a bit naïve, frankly, I had always admired the women who had come before me, but you know when you are looking at people who are advanced in their career, they always make it look so easy, but of course then you learn—it’s really not that easy.”

Easy has not been the overriding characteristic of Vrooman’s path. Soon after becoming CEO of Vancity Credit Union in 2007, she found herself steering it through a recession. “I always joke ‘You should probably know where I’m going next before I go there,’” says Vrooman, alluding to the fact that she took over at YVR just as the global pandemic closed borders and parked planes.

Taking the tough assignments

Under Vrooman, Vancity not only survived but thrived. The credit union became a carbon-neutral financial institution and a living-wage employer. She is known as someone who does not back away from a challenge when an organization needs a pilot during a storm.

“I do find I’ve gotten some skill, I guess I would say, in being able to navigate them in a way that builds the confidence of the organization, builds its performance, builds its resilience—that’s what leadership should do, leave it better than you found it.”

Vrooman believes her background in history and her applied skills in math and statistics have all been integral in preparing her for these challenges. “I think education is just like other essential parts of our life. Balance is really important. So just like we don’t only eat one kind of food, I hope, or we don’t only do one kind of exercise, we need to expose ourselves to different ways of knowing, learning, debating, creating, communicating.”

She is well aware that many creative business minds, such as Apple founder Steve Jobs, or UVic Philosophy alumnus Stewart Butterfield of Slack, studied liberal arts as part of their springboard to success. “So, I love the left-brain right-brain thing. I always encourage young people if they’re passionate about science to take a philosophy or literature course. If they’re passionate about language, French, say, take a computer-science course so that you get the balance. Because of course, when you finish, life does need both of those skills.”

Wealth, wellbeing and the future

Her balanced frame of reference helped her perceive the big picture behind decisions such as how allocation of capital—who gets a loan and who doesn’t—determines not just the future of individuals, but the kind of society we create.

“If we’re not measuring the real outcomes of what we’re doing when we’re applying the tools of finance, when we’re applying the modes of transportation and aviation and logistics and data and connectivity, then it’s a false measure to say that only money, time, quantifiable things are the true measure of success,” she says.

At Vancity, a cooperative with a “one member, one vote” democratic model, this idea resonated. The team had to communicate results to membership in ways that didn’t sacrifice financial gains or service expectations but showed them making a meaningful difference in people’s lives.

Vrooman has been at YVR for five years now. In her estimation, they didn’t just get through the pandemic but came out “much, much stronger.” The airport is situated on a flood plain, on a major river, next to the ocean. They can’t afford to ignore climate realities. “In a time when many companies and organizations are moving away from these commitments, we’ve doubled down on commitments to be net-zero by 2030. We believe that it allows us to manage those risks, the risks of climate change.”

YVR is also the first airport to digitize and use data across the board. It’s a big operation, with 27,000 people working there, so the ability to see and share data to identify risks and opportunities is essential. On the service side, YVR has had strong financials and was also voted as the Best Airport in North America for a record 14^th time. Those votes are from individual passengers, validating that YVR is meeting the diverse needs of the 26-million people who travel through the airport, she says.

Place of connection

Vrooman stresses that, at its core, an airport is about people engaging with other people.

“An airport is ultimately a place of connection. We often forget that. There’s a lot of machinery and equipment and data and security and infrastructure and regulation that goes into something like an aviation hub, but ultimately, it’s also a place of people." 

She says people have told her stories of arriving at the airport as refugees, and knowing they were safe in their new home. “Or the place where they met their grandmother who came for the first time to see them, or the first time they went to university and travelled on their own or, or, or… it’s actually quite an emotional place.”

YVR is a living-wage employer at a time when the people who do the frontline jobs that keep the economy running are struggling. Vrooman is also particularly proud of The Paper Planes café, which provides work experience for young adults who are neurodiverse on the autism spectrum. There is a three-year waiting list to work there.

Vrooman’s acumen as a leader, and her ability, as Carole Taylor noted, to look “beyond the numbers,” has earned her many accolades, including the Queen’s Golden Jubilee Medal in 2003 for outstanding contributions to public service in BC, Canada’s Top 40 Under 40 in 2005, the YWCA Woman of Distinction Award in 2011 and the Order of BC in 2019, has been named the 2025 recipient of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce–Canadian Business Leader of the Year Award and as well as the UVic Distinguished Alumni Award. 

Vrooman is currently chancellor of Simon Fraser University, and only recently wound up her time as head of the Canada Infrastructure Bank, a Crown corporation charged with supporting revenue-generating projects in the public interest. She also co-chairs a new B.C. Premier’s Trade and Economic Security Taskforce.  The word “busy” does not seem strong enough to describe her schedule.

How she makes it work

Vrooman has three non-negotiables that keep her fuelled and on her flight path: a supportive family, quality sleep and time to be truly unplugged.

“I’m very, very fortunate to have a supportive family. They keep me focused on what’s important. We have a saying in my household that my son and my husband will raise with me from time to time. They’ll remind me that I’m ‘not the CEO of everything.’” She can feel free sometimes to take a back seat and let others make a decision, which keeps her humble and grounded. 

“The second thing is, if sleep were a recognizable professional attribute, it would be the Number One thing I would list on my resume. I’m a really good sleeper. I love my sleep. So, I make sure that I get it. I sleep my seven hours a day, no matter what, no matter where. Sleep and rest are important,” she says.

The third non-negotiable is making her precious personal time count. “When I’m unplugged, I’m unplugged. And I make sure whatever I’m doing I try and be 100 per cent present in that, whether it’s going to a dinner party with friends, going for a walk with my mom, or gardening or creating a playlist for a friend—I really try and be all in, and I find that helps.”

Vrooman continues the journey of learning and striving. Of all the industries she has worked in, aviation is the most challenging.

It’s vast and complex—and it works well, 99.9 per cent of the time, she notes. 

Her own travel dreams put Japan at the top of her wish list. She has never visited, and is eager to experience the culture, the cities, the food and the nature. As a travel professional, her top tip is to prepare in advance. Know what you want to do, where you need to be, how you have to pack, what travel documents you need. “That makes the world of difference.”

No matter how many times you’ve done it, travelling through an airport increases people’s anxiety a little, so prepare. YVR made lots of investments recently on helping people navigate their trip with extra staff, technology, data supports and also with a $30-million investment in CT scanners for Canadian Air Transport Authority (CATSA) screening.

UVic a foundational time

As for challenges on her horizon, Vrooman says there is still lots of work to do to promote inclusion—and she has a particular interest in the history of the suffragettes. As an 18-year-old history student, she was surprised to learn how recently women’s voting rights were entrenched. “I remember the first time I read about those women and I thought, wow who knew there was a time—I was quite naïve when I was 18—that women couldn’t vote, that it would be that recent.”

Vrooman is from Kamloops, so Victoria seemed like a bustling city to her then. She thrived during her time at UVic, where she met her spouse and many of her best friends. She has happy memories of nights socializing at Felicita’s pub and of her part-time job working at the UVic Bookstore.  

Her undergraduate history thesis was on women in business-leadership positions at the turn of the century, building off of the suffragette movement. Despite all she has achieved, Vrooman is clear: there is more to do to improve society, and she will not sit on the sidelines.

“I tease my family that I think I’ll be buried with my boots on. I plan to keep working until I’m no longer here on this planet. And I think there’s so much more to do, not for me personally, just to make our communities more inclusive, to improve our ability to talk to one another, even though we have different points of view, to really think about the decisions we need to make to set our economic growth on a path that makes a difference. And people say to me all the time, ‘You can do that from an airport?’ And I say, ‘Yeah.’”

Vrooman’s notion that she’ll keep serving throughout her life fits with the historical figure she would most liked to have met: Queen Elizabeth II. The Queen, who passed away in 2022 at age 96, was the first person that came to the mind of the double history grad.

“I think she was quite impressive and unique, obviously born into the situation she was born into, but I think particularly now that we look back, the way that she led and endured and provided stability in what must have been a very lonely, ultimately, role was admirable,” she says. “ I’d be curious to talk to her about what that was like.”

—Jenny Manzer, BA '97

This article appears in the UVic Torch alumni magazine.

For more Torch stories, go to the UVic Torch alumni magazine page.