After years of interprovin-cial migration, Albertans have grown inured to newcomers with wacky ideas about the environment and how much a home should cost. But are the clients and staff of ATB Financial, the Alberta government-owned bank, ready for Dave Mowat?

Mowat assumes the position of president and CEO on June 11. When his appointment was announced in March, ATB pointed out that he was an Alberta boy, born in Calgary and raised in the Edmonton suburb of Sherwood Park. Fact is, he’s spent his entire banking career in British Columbia. He’s been at Vancity Credit Union, English Canada’s largest credit union, since 1998, the past seven years as CEO. Which is to say he’s steeped in a corporate culture and worldview very different from that of ATB.

Granted, Vancity and ATB share some similarities. Both are western financial institutions founded 60-70 years ago in a populist reaction to the stingy lending policies of the national banks. Vancity has 350,000 members and assets of $12.3 billion; ATB is somewhat larger with 600,000 accounts and almost $19 billion in assets.

But while ATB (formerly known by its full name Alberta Treasury Branches) came from rural roots and has been controlled by a Conservative government for more than a generation, Vancity is as urban and left-wing as financial institutions get. Over the years, its board has been peopled by prominent supporters of British Columbia’s perennially powerful New Democratic Party — limousine socialists, if you will.

It’s also been arguably Canada’s most innovative financial institution. For example, it was the first in Canada to sell ethical investment funds in the 1980s. It launched its own online bank, Citizens Bank of Canada, around the same time ING Direct started poaching Canadian depositors with higher interest. For Vancity, corporate social responsibility means more than sponsoring a fun run; the ability to repay is not its only criterion for making loans. The credit union has been repeatedly cited as a great place to work. And lately it’s been on a push to lighten not just its own environmental footprint but that of its members and its community.

Many of these innovations predated Mowat’s tenure, but he’s been an enthusiastic champion of Vancity’s culture, earning the title of “Marketer of the Year” by the B.C. chapter of the American Marketing Association and “Communicator of the Year” from the International Association of Business Communicators. This is a guy who recently trained in Tennessee with Al Gore to present his own version of An Inconvenient Truth, PowerPoint show and all, to groups of employees and customers. (You can get a glimpse of it on Vancity’s Web site.) And now he’s coming to the hydrocarbon heartland.

Mowat will encounter a very different head office in Edmonton. Alberta, remember, is virtually a one-party state and that party’s colour is blue. Back in the 1990s, opposition parties alleged political interference in a couple of ill-advised loans the Treasury Branches made to supposed Tory friends Peter Pocklington and the Ghermezian brothers, who built West Edmonton Mall (the loans went into default to the tune of hundreds of millions). The fallout was such that the Klein government carved ATB out of the finance ministry and set it up as a Crown corporation. Still, the apple falls only so far from the tree. Talk of privatizing the institution by Progressive Conservatives who once claimed to be “not in the business of being in business” has quieted in recent years as the government discreetly heaps the bank’s now healthy profits onto its luxuriant revenue pile.

Perhaps the ATB board was looking for a shake-up artist to break the organization out of its fusty shell now that its bad-debt days are behind it. (The new regime of Premier Ed Stelmach has already shown a willingness to make overdue changes, such as creating an arms-length Alberta Investment Management Corp. to manage more than $70 billion in funds under the province’s care.) More likely, however, Mowat was simply the best person for the job; Ralph Klein couldn’t argue with Vancity’s growth record.

Still, you have to wonder: once Mowat settles into his corner office on Jasper Avenue, who’s going to rub off on whom? IE