About

During his time in the role of vice president, general counsel and corporate secretary at the Canadian electric power and natural gas utility company Manitoba Hydro, Ken Tennenhouse has recruited a high proportion of his 38 strong team. Apart from expanding what used to be a small function, under Tennenhouse’s management the department has taken on regulatory and other functions, including compliance. This has been particularly beneficial as Manitoba Hydro now sells energy to the US and that process required significant coordination between the internal legal, regulatory and compliance functions. ‘We still use external counsel, but we have achieved our aim to have a legal team that provides a similar level of service to a small or medium sized law firm’. After the early 1990s and 2000s when the energy industry in the country was undergoing deregulation, Tennenhouse has been more regularly called upon to influence the strategic direction of Manitoba Hydro. The legal team ‘became required to produce a report and present it to the board on how utility can be applied. We were also called upon to provide assistance on the changes of the company strategy’, he clarifies. Tennenhouse’s in-house legal career of several decades includes a plethora of remarkable achievements. Relatively early in his career, in the 1990s, Tennenhouse provided crucial legal assistance to what he describes as a ‘mega’ project, the construction of a generating station on the Nelson River northern Manitoba. His work involved contracts, license registration, tender agreements and many other high-pressured legal tasks. More recently, Tennenhouse has made an impression with his governance initiatives, the mandatory compliance program that he has implemented, as well as other compliance training initiatives, a whistle blowing project, and other crucial work on regulation.