From ski hill to executive suite, Robert Rooney has scaled mountains

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By Jim Middlemiss

From ski hill to executive suite, Robert Rooney has scaled mountains.

Robert Rooney, the 2024 Western Canada General Counsel Award’s Lifetime Achievement recipient, has seen a lot in his 41-year career spent working as in-house counsel and an executive for a variety of oil and gas firms.

What he will remember the most isn’t the multi-billion-dollar deals, the shareholder activism and regulatory hearings and protests that he encountered, or the corporate intrigue and chess-like games that came with the role of a company’s top lawyer and the executive suite.

“What stands out most for me is the people I have met and worked with throughout the years. I have been very fortunate to have crossed paths with some very skilled and value-driven people,” said Rooney, who recently retired as executive vice-president and chief legal officer at energy giant Enbridge Inc. There he led a team of 350 professionals across Canada and the United States for the past seven years.

With a market capitalization of almost $130 billion and annual revenues in the $40-$50 billion range, Enbridge is among Canada’s biggest companies. Employing more than 15,500, Enbridge operates one of North America’s longest crude oil and liquids transportation pipeline systems. It also transports about 20 per cent of the natural gas consumed in the United States.

Rooney’s legal career, however, almost never happened. After high school, he spent time as a professional skier with Alpine Canada in the latter 1970s, racing around the world with his good friend Ken Read. That was when the ski team was making its mark internationally as the “Crazy Canucks,” a time he fondly remembers.

When he retired from skiing in his early 20s, Rooney made his way to Western University in London, Ont. to pursue his education.

“I wanted to live and experience a different part of Canada. We’re such a diverse country. You really need to do that to understand Canada and how it ticks.”

His intention was to go to the Ivey Business School, but that meant doing two years of an undergrad degree first. He was walking past the law school, which was taking applications, so he wrote the LSAT and “they let me in.” He was able to take some commerce courses along the way, which whetted his appetite for the business world.

After graduating from law in 1983, the Calgary-raised Rooney took a job in his hometown at law firm Bennett Jones LLP, where he made a name for himself as a dealmaker.

Following 22 years at the firm, including a “couple tours of duty” on the executive management team, Rooney packed it in at the age of 48 in 2005.

“I didn’t have anywhere to go,” he said, but he knew he wanted to follow his entrepreneurial passion, and he understood that it was “time to make the career move” while he still could.

“I had some ideas and started quite quickly to work with some business people.” He joined various energy company boards and was involved in companies that were acquiring international oil and gas assets. It was a period that helped “get him out of his comfort zone” as a lawyer and entrench him in the executive suite.

In 2008, Rooney was headhunted to join Talisman Energy Inc. as executive vice-president, corporate, then one of Canada’s most international oil and gas companies, with operations in 18 countries, including some of the most volatile regions in the world.

In one instance, Rooney was called on to help negotiate the evacuation of employees from Kurdistan in northern Iraq. The terrorist group ISIS was active at the time and had moved within 30 to 40 kilometres of Talisman’s drilling operations. “It was pretty intense.”

He got his people out safely and the experience taught him the value of “establishing strong relationships in the community.” It also showed him the need to ensure that “you have skilled and experienced security teams. It’s that old adage that you need to build the relationships before you need them.”

He later negotiated the deal that saw Talisman sold to Spanish energy giant, Repsol SA for US$13 billion in 2015, after Talisman came under attack from shareholder activists.

He stayed on with Repsol into 2016. Then he left to co-found RimRock Oil & Gas, a Denver-based start-up that secured a US$500 million investment from the global private equity firm Warburg Pincus LLC, funds which were used to buy unconventional oil and gas assets in North Dakota. RimRock was sold to Devon Energy Corp. in 2022 for US$865 million.

After getting RimRock off the ground, Rooney had to decide whether to move to Denver or commute from Calgary, neither of which was appealing for the father of six.

That’s when the Enbridge opportunity arose, and he signed on in 2017. His arrival coincided with Enbridge’s $37-billion acquisition of Houston-based Spectra Energy Corp., the largest ever outbound investment by a Canadian firm. The combination created North America’s largest energy infrastructure company. He oversaw the three-year integration of the two firms.

In 2023, Rooney negotiated the acquisition of three natural gas utilities from Dominion Energy Inc. for $19 billion and oversaw the $4.6-billion equity financing that supported the deal, which to date is the largest equity bought deal in Canadian history.

Rooney was also involved in creating a landmark agreement between Enbridge and 23 First Nations and Metis communities in 2022, which saw the communities acquire a 11.57 per cent non-operating interest in seven Enbridge pipelines in northern Alberta for $1.12 billion. It included a $250-million loan guarantee from the Alberta Indigenous Opportunities Corp., a provincial Crown corporation, used to secure the First Nations and Metis investment in Enbridge. The deal is expected to generate $10 million annually for the communities and is seen as a model for future business deals involving the Indigenous community and industry. Rooney calls it a “win-win” for all involved.

Over his career, Rooney has also been a big proponent of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. He supported the creation of the Enbridge Legal Services Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Council. That has substantially increased the number of women in senior leadership positions in the legal department. As well, the legal department created an Indigenous and Black mentorship program for law students that pairs them with company lawyers for career guidance, among other initiatives.

“We live in a very diverse community, and we should try to reflect that,” he said of his interest in DEI initiatives. “If you do that, it will ultimately result in better decision-making.”

Rooney is described by his colleagues as a “strategic thinker,” which he said is a “generous description,” but one that he thinks can actually be taught or learned through mentoring, another business tool that he strongly supports. “I have had the opportunity of working with some very astute, strategic thinkers,” he said, rattling off a who’s who list of oil and gas CEOs and executives he has worked with over the years whom he credits for his successful career. “When you work closely with people during complex and tense transactions, you can really learn a lot about strategy. Like Yogi Berra says, ‘You can observe a lot by just watching.’”

As for what’s next, “I’m retired from full-time work,” said Rooney, who recently joined the board of oilsands producer Meg Energy Corp. He remains chairman of Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame, which he said has transformed from a bricks and mortar institution to a virtual museum, providing educational programming for kids across the country.

“It’s been an incredible transition.”