Graham Kee: The Mediator

To get the job done at a major seaport, Graham Kee convinces dozens of competing stakeholders that collaborating on security helps everyone succeed

By Sarah D. Scalet

June 01, 2005 — CSO — The thin, white card that Graham Kee keeps in his wallet doesn't look like anything special. Roughly the size of a credit card, it displays his picture and name, along with the logo for the Port of Vancouver, an identification number and an expiration date. Yet the card carries much more meaning than its flimsy weight suggests.

In 1997, when Kee took over as CSO for the Port of Vancouver, there were plans in place for not one kind of ID card but several. In fact, there might have been dozens if each of the port's 27 terminal operators had created its own system. Somehow though, Kee, an unassuming sailor from small-town New Brunswick, Canada, drew together the port community's 23,000 diverse membersfrom longshoremen to law enforcement, from truckers to union bosses, from tugboat operators to government regulators to 160 port authority employeesto develop a standard smart card system now used to access all the different areas of the 160,000-acre port.

The standard ID card didn't happen because the port authority had a lot of money to throw around. (Until recently, the Canadian government could not give security grants to its ports.) It didn't happen because the groups involved had a history of smooth relations. (When Kee started, the longshoremen's unionlong linked in Canadians' minds with organized crimeand law enforcement officers could hardly bear to be in the same room.)

No, observers say that the cards came about because of Kee's polite insistence on asking, not telling, the port community about the best ways to improve security and business efficiency, and then building a system that incorporated that feedback. This method of simultaneously building trust and influence is the same one that Kee brings to his next big challenge: getting union bosses to accept a new background checks mandate.

"Graham has taken an inclusive approach to security rather than a dictatorial approach, and I think that's largely why we've succeeded," says Onkar Athwal, vice president of operations at the British Columbia Maritime Employers Association, which represents ship owners, wharf operators (including container terminals) and stevedores for Canada's West Coast. "If I tell him, Graham, I don't like that. It doesn't work,' he says, What else can we do?'"

Kee, for his part, credits to the organizations he brought together. "I think I get [my approach] from working in small towns," says Kee, 48, sitting in his office on Vancouver's waterfront. Behind him, a spring rain is beating down on the port, but business is humming. Seaplanes land, lumber is hauled in, oil is pumped onto ships, and trailer-trucks and trains carry off loaded containers headed inland. This hubbub is Kee's adopted community.

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