VANCOUVER - One day in early December, Greg Klassen, the senior vice-president of marketing for the Canadian Tourism Commission, was summoned to a confidential meeting at Tourism Vancouver.

In the room were Chris Anderson, the curator of TED, the global cultural conference that brings together the world’s best thinkers and doers, and Rick Antonson, Tourism Vancouver CEO.

The meeting lasted only 30 minutes, but they wanted to talk about something so risky that if word leaked out at all, it would be dead forever.

With a racing heart and sweaty palms, Klassen listened as Anderson and his Vancouver operations director, Katherine McCartney, a longtime friend of Antonson, said they wanted to move the worldwide cultural phenomenon to Vancouver from Long Beach, Calif. At the same time, TED would move its TEDActive simulcast conference to Whistler from Palm Springs.

For nearly three decades the conference — known for its motto of “Ideas Worth Spreading” and its popular TED Talks interviews — has called California home. That it was considering leaving the United States to come to Canada was, for Klassen and Antonson, stunning. This was the Holy Grail of conferences, so big in fact that it might even be viewed on the same level as the idea for the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics — whose birth, ironically, had taken place 15 years earlier around the same table.

“I turned to Katherine and said ‘I thought I was coming for Oprah. I never thought it was this big,’” Klassen recalled Monday.

To the uninitiated, bringing the 1,400-delegate TED conference to Vancouver may not seem like much. After all, this is an Olympic city that knows how to put on a show.

But then, TED is so rarefied, with its agenda of provocative leaders and speakers, that each of the attendees — many of them influencers and thought-changers in their own right — have to submit an essay on why they should be allowed to buy a $7,500 ticket.

The conference, one of the world’s most influential incubators of ideas about technology, entertainment and design (thus, TED), has become so popular that more than 1,000 of its speeches, which since 2006 are now indexed online, have received more than one billion views.

The main conference and a second global conference based in Edinburgh, Scotland, have featured everyone from presidents of countries and leading scientists to business leaders and social innovators. For 18 minutes, speakers talk about their area of passion or knowledge in the hope of igniting more discussion, ideas and action. Among the luminaries have been Sir Ken Robinson, Stephen Hawking, Pranav Mistry, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Jane Goodall, Sal Khan and Elizabeth Gilbert.

The phenomenon of TED has generated regional conferences such as TEDxVancouver, held here last year, and even a TED Prize, a $1 million award for an idea that will change the world.

But now, as the production heads toward its 30th anniversary, Anderson and his collaborators wanted to move the concept even more broadly onto an international stage.