Lifelong Learning

Tina Gardiner was a risk manager before she even knew risk management existed.

The insurance and risk manager for the Regional Municipality of York and recent recipient of the prestigious Don Stuart Award recalls all the way back when she was a kid on the playground, warning kids swinging sticks around that they “would poke someone’s eye out with that.”

“It’s like risk management was there and I just didn’t know what it was,” says Gardiner. “So when I found it, a switch went on and I became very passionate about it. I just wanted to absorb as much as I could, learn as much as I could and get involved as much as I could.”

A native of Peterborough, Ontario, Gardiner graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree from Wilfrid Laurier University. The route to her career in risk management took a meandering — but nonetheless interesting — path, during which she learned many things about many different aspects of the business.

After graduation, she worked briefly for the Minister of the Environment testing soil lead levels. She then went on to work for Liberty Mutual in its loss prevention department. Her job required her to go out into the field and evaluate risks on behalf of the underwriters and make recommendations to clients on how they might improve their loss prevention programs. The experience, she says, allowed her to dip her toe in all sorts of industries, learning about each one. She began to focus on the transportation sector, where she got a firsthand training in risk. On one occasion she went to a truck operator training centre, where she got to jackknife a trailer on a skid pad.

“All of the stuff we would put our trucking clients through, I got to do,” she says. “It was an amazing experience to actually jackknife a big rig, even just a small amount, in a controlled environment with an instructor alongside.”

Because she was technically in the insurance industry, she began to take her CIP courses and work towards a designation. One of her clients at Liberty Mutual, the risk manager for the University of Toronto, encouraged her to consider pursuing risk management too.

“He sparked an interest in me, so I started taking my CRM courses simultaneously as my CIP and juggling them back and forth,” she says. “Oh, I was also a newlywed and a new mom at the time.”

It wasn’t long before Thrifty Car Rentals poached her and asked her to form a risk management department there. The company was comprised of independent franchise owners, so it had a very entrepreneurial spirit. “We had a pool that we did insurance through, so it was a bit like having a mini-insurance company,” she said. “I would buy coverage and supply it to all of the independent owners, and I would do the underwriting, rating and loss prevention training.”

When her second daughter was born and she was on mat leave, Hertz approached her. That organization, she said, had more of a corporate structure; it wanted its Canadian claims office run like a third party claims administrator out of the United States. “So, at Hertz I became a bit of a claims guru,” she says.

As if Gardiner didn’t already have enough designations, she obtained her broker’s license and became a broker at Morris & Mackenzie. “I had to get RIBO’d,” she laughs.

She spent 18 months with the firm, developing new business and helping it through a re-branding initiative. “One of the areas I explored while I was working with Morris & Mackenzie was municipal,” she says, foreshadowing her next career move. “It really fascinated me. There are so many different things I could get into working in the municipal sector.”

Once, while out on a client call, she drove past a municipal building in Newmarket — now her current office — and thought to herself: “I’m going to work there one day.” Lo and behold, she’s now in her eighth year with the municipality of York.

At the same time she ex- plored different careers within the field, Gardiner also immersed herself into the profession as a volunteer. She spent seven years working on the insurance committee of the United Church of Canada’s head office. The committee “brought together some pretty big heavy-hitters,” she says. “I was so lucky to work with that committee, because it brought together some people with lots and lots of experience — Don Stuart, Robert Patzelt and Lloyd Hackett, among many others, for example.”

Gardiner also joined the Ontario chapter of the Risk and Insurance Management Society (ORIMS). “I was put in charge of editing the chapter’s newsletter,” she says. “And when the director of the publicity portfolio took another job in another city, I stepped in and filled the position.

“From there, I just worked my way through the board. I had never been on a board before, and I thought it was quite cool.”

Gardiner ended up being president of ORIMS during her second maternity leave. That “was great because it kept me in the loop and allowed me to have adult conversations,” she quips.

She continued the adult conversations while co-chairing the 1997 RIMS Canada Conference. The experiences and connections she made through her involvement with RIMS and ORIMS opened up a lot of doors, she says. “I have met a ton of people and have been able to navigate the industry just from the networking I’ve been able to do through volunteering. Through my involvement, I got to know my colleagues and peers in the industry, so there’s always someone to call whenever I have a question.”

Gardiner says she has gained so much from her experiences, but her peers and colleagues clearly feel she has given at least as much back. The industry formally acknowledged Gardiner’s many hours of volunteer service in September 2010. At the RIMS Canada Conference in Edmonton, Alberta, RIMS honoured Gardiner with the Donald M. Stuart Award, basically recognizing her as Canada’s risk manager of the year.

Gardiner describes receiving the award as “overwhelming.” She recalls helping ORIMS with its 50th anniversary earlier this year. Part of the promotion for the celebration involved running a series of ‘Did You Know?’ ads. One of the ads listed the previous winners of the Donald M. Stuart Award. “As I was typing up the list, I was thinking: ‘These are all great people,'” Gardiner says. “Two weeks later, I got a phone call. It was overwhelming that my name is now on that list.”

Like many award recipients before her, Gardiner is now taking on mentoring roles, both in her workplace and with ORIMS. “I’m still absorbing tons of stuff from my coaches and my mentors, but now I’m starting to give some back,” she says.

Moving forward, Gardiner says she would like risk management to evolve hand-in-hand with sustainability. “Sustainability sits so well with enterprise risk management and it seems like the next extension to me,” she says. “I think the world is going towards being sustainable, so I think risk management has to go there, too.”

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I’m still absorbing tons of stuff from my coaches and my mentors, but now I’m starting to give some back.