S. Robert Blair
businessperson
Sidney Robert "Bob" Blair (13 August 1929 – 18 April 2009) was a Canadian oilman. During a career that spanned from 1951 to 1991, Blair played a major role in the development of the Alberta petroleum industry. In 1970 he was appointed president of the Alberta Gas Trunk Line Company Limited (later renamed NOVA Corporation), a position he held until 1986. Over the course of his presidency, he transformed AGTL/NOVA from a provincial transmission utility into a diversified energy and chemicals giant. Blair was a vocal economic nationalist who spent much of his career working to develop Canadian-owned industry, often putting himself in conflict with Canada's foreign-owned majors. He is also remembered for leading the unsuccessful attempt to build the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline in the 1970s.
Biography
Sidney Robert Blair was born in Trinidad to Sidney Martin Blair (1897–1981) and Janet Russell Gentleman (1895–1974). Blair's father, of Scottish Presbyterian origin, was born in Parry Sound and in 1902 moved with his family to Alberta. Before World War I he attended classes at the University of Alberta. During the war he served as a flight instructor in the Royal Flying Corps and lectured at Khaki University.
“S. Robert Blair” enters the record as businessperson. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Robert, Blair and businessperson can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 5, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q7387835. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1929, 2009, 1951 and 1991.
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This entry incorporates text from “S. Robert Blair” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.