Keith Beedie, an “iconic figure” in Burnaby business, has passed away.
The founder and patriarch of the Beedie Development Group, died September 20. He was 91.
According to the family’s obituary, Beedie was born in Vancouver on June 13, 1926. He and a partner set up a woodwork shop in Marpole after the Second World War. (He enlisted in the air force on his 18th birthday but was never sent overseas.)
After building a home for his family – his first wife, Leona Candaele, and their three children – he started working on other homes. Eventually he broke out on his own forming Beedie Construction in 1954. In the early 1960s, the company expanded to take on industrial and commercial construction.
The Beedie Development Group had an office in Burnaby on Kingsway just east of Royal Oak Avenue which Beedie built in 1956. Fifty years later, with business booming for Beedie, those offices were sold to the B.C. New Democratic Party, and the company moved to much larger quarters at Gilmore Diversion and Manor Street in March 2007.
“He was an iconic figure in Burnaby construction and, in fact, throughout the Lower Mainland,” said Burnaby Mayor Derek Corrigan. “He was one of those old-time, self-made entrepreneurs that was prepared to take the risks necessary to continue to develop a pretty impressive list of construction achievements.”
Corrigan added Beedie was instrumental in industrial land development not just in Burnaby – particularly in the Big Bend area – but in many corners of the region.
“He was one of the first people to do the tilt-up construction that they utilized for fairly inexpensive development of industrial sites. He perfected those methods and became a go-to developer around the Lower Mainland for industrial sites,” said Corrigan.
Tilt-up is a technique where concrete slab walls are formed on a floor before the finished product is tilted up into place. It was a system he saw used in California and adapted to the wetter Vancouver market.
Corrigan pointed out the company recently returned to Beedie’s residential roots by teaming up with Anthem Properties to develop five high-rise towers at Station Square in Metrotown.
Beedie and his second wife Betty, who he married in 1966, formed The Keith and Betty Beedie Foundation donating $1.5 million for a MRI machine for Burnaby Hospital. It also put up academic scholarships for Simon Fraser University and built a $1 million softball field there. Keith and their son Ryan, who now heads the company, donated $22 million to SFU to start the Beedie School of Business. The university conferred on Keith an honourary doctorate degree in 2016.
“He donated a lot of money to different aspects of the community,” said Corrigan. “He gave back to the community that made such a good life for him.”
In lieu of flowers, the family is requesting donations be made to the Burnaby Hospital Foundation (bhfoundation.ca).
