Way of the JEDI: How Brenda Bailey is using her entrepreneurial past and tech experience to move the BC NDP forward

Editors’ update: This profile was written prior to the provincial election in October. Brenda Bailey was re-elected as the B.C. minister of jobs, economic development and innovation. 

It’s the middle of July, and around 90 people have packed a room in Vancouver’s Gastown. There are drinks on offer, along with charcuterie. People are mingling and shaking hands and looking at name tags and making small talk.

Of course, it’s hard to ignore the three archery stations at the back, where guests are getting lessons from instructors in red vests on how to properly nock and then shoot a bow and arrow. Or, in the adjacent room—practically a museum, with medieval-looking shields and crests adorning the walls—the people practicing how to swordfight.

Academie Duello, a martial arts school on West Hastings Street, isn’t the typical spot for a political fundraiser. But then, Brenda Bailey isn’t a typical politician.

The attendees run the gamut in terms of ethnicity, gender and age. The tie that binds is that most have experience in, or at least familiarity with, the tech sector. If you were up for a prison sentencing, you would not want to be given the collective hours of Dungeons and Dragons played in the room.

A veteran of Vancouver’s video game industry and a lifelong fan of franchises like Star Wars and Zelda, Bailey is comfortable here. After all, the acronym of her ministry—Jobs, Economic Development and Innovation (JEDI)—is no coincidence. She makes her way around the room shaking hands and chatting easily while carefully cradling a glass of wine. The 57-year-old is one of the tallest people in the building and she regularly bends down to hear what people have to say. She gestures excitedly with her hands. She speaks softly but firmly. She laughs easily. Everything that comes out of her mouth is delivered precisely, but doesn’t seem practiced.

Looking at this calm exterior, one wonders if, underneath it, Bailey is worried. In October, British Columbians will go to the polls again. Bailey’s portfolio has been a talking point for opposition parties who have grave concerns about her NDP government’s handling of the economy and who decry its supposed abandonment of the private sector. She’s also running in a newly created riding, Vancouver-South Granville, which covers the eastern part of Kitsilano and the western part of Fairview. It’s certainly not her current Vancouver-False Creek riding, which encompasses most of Downtown Vancouver (a constituency that had only been held by the then-named BC Liberal Party before she ran).

The NDP’s popularity, it’s safe to say, isn’t close to what it was in 2020, when Premier John Horgan called a snap election and won the biggest margin of victory for the party since 1991.

Might that be a risk for a high-profile minister who presides over a huge portfolio that essentially encompasses small businesses (which are struggling in a tough economy), as well as a beleaguered tech sector that has taken more than a few lumps post-COVID?

Bailey has positioned herself as the person who will continue to try to get the latter back on track, and it’s clear that the people in this room and in the sector at large believe it. Whether she gets the chance to do it—or to push through an increasingly tight global economy and see actual rewards that create a legacy for an NDP party with a historically incomplete record when it comes to economic management—is yet to be determined.

After about an hour and a half, Bailey approaches the archery section of the room. She listens intently while the instructor shows her how to place the arrow on the bow, pull it back and guide it into the target. Supporters and staff alike gather behind her, filming the scene on their phones. The pressure mounts. She pulls the bowstring back, pauses, and releases, just missing the target as the arrow flies high into the white curtain behind it.

She consults with the instructor and fires again, missing in almost the exact same way. Bailey stops smiling momentarily but doesn’t give up. She steadies the bow, consults the instructor again briefly, then fires right into the middle of the yellow target. Cheers erupt from around her as she gracefully passes the bow set to the instructor, grabs her glass of wine and steps back into the crowd. “That was quite fun!” she says.

Episode I: A City Far, Far Away

Brenda Bailey grew up in Nanaimo, born to a heavy-duty mechanic father who worked in the forestry industry and a mother who ran a small publishing firm and taught at Vancouver Island University. Her brother was an activist in Clayoquot Sound’s War in the Woods, so, as Bailey puts it, “there was a lot of hot debate. The question of forestry versus environment was pretty live at my kitchen table.”

As her opinions about the world were being formed, she was also being drawn to a galaxy far away. “I saw Star Wars when it first came out, and dressed up as Princess Leia for a year,” she says. “I wrapped my hair in those buns. It drove my mom nuts.”

Bailey went to McGill University and earned a degree in political science with a focus on Middle Eastern studies. To get through school, she started a business selling branded T-shirts for sports teams. “At McGill, everyone had so much money; my family didn’t,” Bailey says. “I showed up there as this kid from Nanaimo with big hair and a leather jacket and cowboy boots. Everybody else was a prep. So I thought: how can I afford Ralph Lauren?”

Episode II: A Disturbance in the Force

Bailey came back to B.C. and earned a second degree in social work at the University of Victoria. She also had three children with fellow McGill classmate Basil Stumborg, who is now a decision analysis expert at BC Hydro. Eventually, Bailey was hired on with the Canadian Cancer Society as the regional manager of Greater Vancouver and the coastal region. Ultimately, though, Bailey decided the work wasn’t quite in line with what she wanted to do. “I learned that I wasn’t really a social worker, but I am a leader,” she says. Around that time, she and Stumborg divorced, and Bailey realized that she wanted to pursue entrepreneurship.

“The sane thing to do would have been to invest in a townhouse and take the safe route,” she says. “But for me, [the divorce] was more of a driver. I wanted to provide well for my children. It gave me a lot of fire in my belly. And you need it—you have to have that driver, whatever it is. For me, it was not having to say no to my kids when they wanted to do ski lessons or ride horses.”

It was around the mid-2000s when Bailey undertook an evaluation of where people were making money at the time. She didn’t have to look far—one of her main hobbies, video games, was blowing up. At the time, handheld devices like the Nintendo DS and PlayStation Portable were coming out. “You could build less-expensive games that were high quality and really engaging on smaller platforms,” she says. Bailey was rowing competitively at the time, and one of her crewmates introduced her to a group of Electronic Arts employees—Ryan Bedard, Russell Rice, Brian Tolin, Steve Tolin and Phil Weeks—who were looking for a businessperson to start a new video game company with.

Episode III: The Phone Wars

“They hired a guy who wasn’t what they were looking for—they were unsure if they trusted him,” says Bailey. “Whereas I was the nice woman from the Cancer Society. So they took a chance on me.”

Deep Fried Entertainment was established in 2005 and shipped a handful of titles, including MLB Superstars, Major League Baseball 2K9: Fantasy All-Stars and Full Auto 2: Battlelines. At its height, the company had close to 50 employees.

“Deep Fried was doing some cool work, and Brenda was a community builder, an innovator, a business leader,” says Lynda Brown-Ganzert, then the president of New Media BC and currently the founder and CEO of life sciences SaaS platform RxPx. The pair found friendship as two of the few women in Vancouver’s male-dominated tech space. “She was just a really kind and interesting person,” Brown-Ganzert remembers.

Some five years after helping launch the company, Bailey sold her shares to her partners. “We had a difference of opinion on the iPhone,” she says. “2008 was a pivotal year; many businesses went under. But we were well-positioned.”

Deep Fried had spent the money to develop its own game engine that could deliver on a number of platforms. “When the iPhone came out, there was an opportunity for us to become a major developer for mobile,” Bailey says. “The touch tool was something people were trying to figure out. We’d solved it. I wanted to go in that direction. My partners were intent on staying with Nintendo and doubling down on the Wii. My business advice was to go to Apple, but I couldn’t get my team to go with me. It was a good learning experience.”

If there’s any emotion in Bailey’s voice, it reflects disappointment that she couldn’t convince her partners to come with her. There is no hint of bravado or bluster. “A very similar studio in Australia pivoted to iPhone and became one of the top developers,” she says plainly. “They’re now valued at over a billion dollars.”

Her takeaway? “That I would never again be in a position in business where I don’t have the decision-making power. I can’t be a 40-percent partner again.” Deep Fried Entertainment closed its doors shortly after Bailey left.

Episode IV: A New Hope

With a bit of money in her pocket, Bailey and fellow video game executive Kirsten Forbes co-founded Silicon Sisters Interactive with the goal of making games for women and girls. “It was a passion play,” she says. “When I was working in games, I became aware that there was an endemic problem that the people who built video games didn’t believe that girls liked video games. And studios would fund games for girls at a much lower rate. That created lower-quality games for girls.”

She points to the Nanaimo arcades of her youth, when Centipede and Asteroids were all the rage. “There were lots of young women and men playing those games. But [the industry] became focused on boys. It was a decision. In the beginning, both were involved.”

Silicon Sisters reached some 20 employees at its height and published games like School 26, its sequel School 26: Summer of Secrets and Everlove: Rose. The studio also garnered widespread support from the tech industry and beyond.

“Brenda identified the market,” says Carina Kom, a veteran of the video game industry who once did contract work for Silicon Sisters and now runs Vancouver-based studio Simply Sweet Games, which was inspired by Bailey and Forbes and has a similar mission.

“We had great conversations about how to bring inclusion and sustainability into the workforce,” says Kom. “Brenda also shared so many stories from her tenure in the games industry, being called a MILF and shit like that. So unprofessional. But she’s a tall, blonde woman. That gets noticed, it gets attention—sometimes unwanted attention. A lot of her stories were preparing me for that reality I’d have to face, ultimately. And I did. We do what we have to do.”

The business also faced the same challenges that any small video game company has to deal with: it’s hard to get games funded and shipped. Loc Dao was working as the head of the National Film Board’s digital studio when his organization approached Silicon Sisters about making a game based on one of its classic shorts, The Cat Came Back.

“They delivered a killer prototype that the NFB didn’t move forward with—it had nothing to do with [Silicon Sisters], just because of budgets and the costs of making a video game,” says Dao. “But the game was so addictive, in a good way. You could tell it would have been a hit. It really hurt. It was so compelling. We just fell in love with it.”

In the end, Bailey wound her studio down in 2018. She still believes that it was just ahead of its time: “We went a bit early. The #MeToo movement hadn’t happened yet. I think it would have been a different story… the types of work-for-hire contracts we were being offered were just not aligned with caring deeply about high-quality video games for girls.”

For example, she says, Silicon Sisters was approached about making a game based on Kim Kardashian. “At that time, she was really only famous for a leaked sex tape,” says Bailey. “I couldn’t figure out what that would look like.”

Eventually, after Kardashian’s popularity ballooned, American game developer Glu Mobile produced Kim Kardashian: Hollywood. It became one of the most popular games in the iOS App Store. “I think if you figure out what girls want to play, you can make buckets of money and create great experiences,” Bailey says. “I did a lecture on that game at [the Game Developers Conference] and broke down how they did it and made it work. We were a little bit early, but that opportunity remains. I’ve seen some good games being designed.”

Episode V: The First JEDI

After a brief “midlife crisis” during which she studied at the UBC Allard School of Law, Bailey became the executive director of DigiBC, the nonprofit that aims to accelerate the growth of the province’s creative technology sector. “I had been frustrated for a long time, both when the BC Liberals and the NDP were in charge, about us not really seeing the opportunity in the tech sector,” says Bailey. “I was bugging [then-premier] John Horgan about it and he essentially said, ‘If you want to fix this, you could put your hand up.’”

Bailey grew up in an NDP town and had parents who were NDP supporters, but she wasn’t sure if she was. “I’m a businessperson who cares about social issues. I wasn’t sure if those two things could live together. But I was thinking about the NDP of 40 years ago. In this NDP, absolutely they can.”

She ran in Vancouver-False Creek, a riding that had only gone BC Liberal-red in its previous three elections, against former Vancouver mayor Sam Sullivan, who hadn’t lost an election in his 27-year political career. She beat Sullivan by some 2,000 votes in a contest where over 24,000 ballots were cast. “It was a tough campaign, very contentious. It got a bit ugly in a few places,” says Bailey, thinking back on the many unhoused people in the riding. “Of course we want to have safety for everyone in the community, but we want to do it in a way that’s compassionate.”

Sullivan, reached by email, said that he didn’t actually see Bailey during the campaign, adding that she was focused on getting a school built in Olympic Village: “All of my interactions with her were good before the campaign and after it, and she seemed like a nice person.” (Earlier this year, the NDP announced $150 million in funding for an Olympic Village school, 17 years after the site was first chosen. It is slated to open to 630 students in 2029.)

Bailey was given the role of parliamentary secretary for technology and innovation by Horgan before current premier David Eby dubbed her the first JEDI minister.

She has spent much of her time in the role out in public, whether that’s attending fundraising announcements (like a recent one at the office of Aspect Biosystems in which the province committed $23.7 million to help the company develop its innovative bio-printed tissue work) or conferences and trade delegations to other countries. Bailey also played a major role in bringing Toronto’s famed Collision tech conference to B.C. under the new moniker of Web Summit Vancouver, something she’s confident will result in millions of dollars in tech deals landing in the province.

There seems to be no doubt that she’s got the backing of the tech sector, even through some challenging times of late. “Brenda is an icon in the games business here in B.C. and in Canada,” says Josh Nilson, co-founder and former CEO of Vancouver’s East Side Games. “I don’t know many people that work as hard as she does to make our industry better now and for the future.”

Episode VI: Return of the JEDI?

In terms of being out in the community, Bailey’s record is hard to question. She routinely leaves Victoria on Thursday night and heads back on Sunday when the legislature is in session. “She’s always doing three or four events a night in addition to working during the day,” says Brown-Ganzert.

It’s a schedule that she describes as demanding, especially when trying to find time to connect with her three adult children. The balancing act is made possible in part, she says, by having a supportive partner—Bijan Sanii, CEO of fintech firm INETCO Systems Ltd. “I haven’t always had that,” she says.

Even the official opposition critic for her ministry, BC United MLA Todd Stone, who admits that he doesn’t know Bailey well on a personal level, describes her as “someone who seems to work hard. She takes the time to get out and in front of businesses.”

Bailey knows, however, that her government has some work to do when it comes to other parts of her portfolio. “I don’t think in my 57 years I’ve ever seen a time where there have been more pressures on small businesses from everywhere,” she says, pointing to global inflation, supply chain challenges, interest rates and a shift in consumer behaviour.

“Brenda is just another minister in a long string of jobs ministers that have presided over a very rapid deterioration of the private sector economy in B.C.,” says Stone, noting some Business Council of B.C. reports that show, over the last seven years, that employment in the public sector has grown around five times more quickly than in the private sector. Stone blames, in part, regulations on industries like forestry and mining. “There isn’t a private sector jobs plan… None of this is sustainable.”

For her part, Bailey points to measures like providing grants that don’t need to be paid back instead of loans for small businesses, and increasing the employer health tax threshold in the 2024 budget: “That expansion is a really big deal for small businesses—it was the number one thing they were asking us for.”

She also clearly hasn’t forgotten where she came from. Thinking back on those conversations around the kitchen table in her youth, she says they gave her the belief that you can consider both forestry and the environment—something she worked to demonstrate when she announced up to $6.7 million in grants for Kalesnikoff Mass Timber in Castlegar.

Back at Academie Duello, she gathers her supporters together in a circle and talks about some of the work her government has done for the tech sector. Most of it is routine, the precise and considered statements that anyone who has spent time with Bailey is familiar with. Until it isn’t. “I want…” Bailey says, pausing to collect herself as she tears up, “that little girl on Vancouver Island with a dream to see herself in tech.”

By early August, neither BC United nor the Conservative Party of BC had named candidates in Bailey’s riding. The fight that she’s been powering up her lightsaber for will have to wait a little while longer. But it is coming.