J.C. Jones

"All attempts to present Sealand’s case were made by Jones. Craig 64 Dobbin sat quiet and unsmiling. He let the Sealand president absorb the verbal abuse during several minutes of Aerospatiale’s harangue, then interrupted another of the lawyer's diatribes by standing up and raising his hand. “I’ve had it up to here with you people,” he said when the lawyer sputtered to silence. “You want your helicopters back, here’s where they are.” He began waving his arms, directing the Aerospatiale’s team towards appropriate points of the compass. “There are three parked deep in the Amazon jungle, two more up on Baffin Island, two in St. John’s and three in Africa. You want ‘em, you go and get ’em. But I’m cutting off the insurance on them, bringing my pilots home, moving the helicopters out of the hangars, and you can forget about maintenance. So go get your helicopters. We're going home. Let’s go, J.C.” Without even a glance back, Dobbin stalked out of the board room, J.C. Jones at his heels."

"Robert Foster made his pitch to potential investors based in part on the performance of recently acquired Toronto Helicopters. The addition to Sealand was an established, well-run organization whose steady cash flow promised to alleviate Sealand’s fiscal problems. Adding Okanagan would make Sealand a healthy operation capable of riding out future financial difficulties. The response from Bay Street investors was decidedly cool; as J.C. Jones put it, “Everywhere we went we got sand kicked in our faces.”"

"Hurdles needed to be jumped. Pat Aldous had assumed that he would remain cEo of Okanagan as an independent corporation. No, Dobbin informed him, the two companies would be merged into one. In that case, Aldous proposed, he should be named cEo of the new company, since he held the top post in Okanagan. Again, no; J.C. Jones, who just a few years earlier had reported to Aldous, would serve as Aldous’s new boss. “Craig Dobbin was loyal to me,” Jones said. “He believed you went home from the dance with the person you came with.”"

"THE CAREER SUCCESS of Christine Baird is illustrative of both Dobbin’s insight into an employee’s potential and his ability to exploit that potential for his own and the subject’s benefit. Hired as secretary to Sealand’s then-president Al Soutar, Baird impressed J.C. Jones when he arrived to fill Soutar’s role. “I was doing a lot of travelling at the time,” Jones says, “and I would call back to the office to check on things, see if this helicopter had been serviced on time or that flight had left as scheduled. When I would ask to speak to the ops manager or the service manager, Christine would say, ‘What do you want to know?’ I would tell her, and she would have the answer right there at her fingertips. In my opinion, and this includes everybody, vice-presidents and all, she was the sharpest person in the cHc building. An amazing woman.”"

"Back on this side of the Atlantic, Dobbin grew intrigued by Helicopter Welders Ltd., a Langley, B.C., firm engaged in servicing and rebuilding helicopters, and he proposed the purchase of the company to the cuc board of directors. The board was cool to the idea. In a fit of pique, Dobbin purchased it himself, changed its name to Heli-Welders of Canada, and installed the now unemployed J.C. Jones to manage it. Within a few months Heli-Welders had expanded significantly, growing from a staff of twenty-eight to . sixty employees and producing substantial profits. With a degree of understandable smugness, Dobbin sold his private company to CHC and pocketed the profit."