Beyond the numbers
May 26, 2025
UVic History alumna Tamara Vrooman, President and CEO of YVR, has earned national acclaim as a gifted, compassionate leader who can navigate organizations through turbulent times to produce a stronger, more resilient organization better able to serve its own people and society.
For someone who is heralded as a brilliant motivator and mentor, who broke down barriers in BC’s civil service as deputy finance minister, who led Canada’s biggest credit union through a recession, then took the reins of the Vancouver International Airport (YVR) right before a global pandemic fell like a heavy, wet curtain, it is surprising to learn that Tamara Vrooman did not always have a knack for numbers. That skill came later.
“I actually always had a way with words, and to me math is just a language. It’s actually the universal language because it’s one that we can all speak. It’s got component parts, it goes together, you make things.”
Speaking from her office at YVR, where she serves as President and CEO, Vrooman says once she realized math was “really just a language,” it opened up a whole new world.
That world has been expansive. Vrooman earned two history degrees at UVic, a BA in 1991 and an MA in 1995, an experience she loved, then entered the work force in the civil service. Finding her career track stalled, she returned to UVic to sharpen her skills in math and statistics. After that, there was no stopping her ascent, which former colleague Carole Taylor described as “meteoric” in the nomination for Vrooman’s Distinguished Alumni Award, which she received in 2011.
In supporting the nomination, Taylor wrote that Vrooman’s academic backg