Archive for June, 2008

Met an old friend walking on King Street in downtown Toronto yesterday. Let’s call him Chicken Little; he believes the sky is falling. Not because of the global financial crisis, but because Canada is suffering from lethargy and a lack of innovation from which we’ll never recover.

Chicken Little recited a litany of tales he’d recently learned. An executive at an international company told him they can get people to move to Hamburg or Boston but not Toronto because there’s nothing worthwhile here. Someone else who began their career at a Canadian bank when that institution was five times bigger than Banco Santander pointed out that Santander is now five times bigger than the Canadian bank. Another individual complained that our federal civil service, once a storied and distinguished group, no longer punches above its weight. As for Canada’s vaunted peacekeeping role, Panama has more soldiers wearing the UN blue berets than Canada.
There were other stories, but I got worn down from listening. When he finally stopped to take a breath, I told him I was working on a book about Research in Motion and the BlackBerry, a successful Canadian company with a high profile global brand if there ever was one. Ten years ago, RIM had two hundred employees, now they have more than 8,000.

CL was not impressed, claiming that RIM couldn’t even hire the top graduates from the University of Waterloo, right on their doorstep; they were all being wooed away by Microsoft in Redmond, Washington. And why hadn’t RIM caused to be created a Canadian Silicon Valley filled with dozens of other success stories as did the launch of Hewlett-Packard?

I reflected on the morning I’d just spent at the Million Dollar Round Table, attended by 7,600 of the top life insurance agents from around the world. The upbeat presentations at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre were about courage and persistence, motivation and mettle, how life insurance could change lives and offer career success.
While no one likes life insurance agents because they remind us of our own mortality, I’d rather spend a morning with them than five minutes on a street with the likes of Chicken Little. I did not play the role of Henny Penny. I did not join Chicken Little to go and warn the king that the future of Canada is all behind us.

I stopped recently at Museum station on the Toronto subway to inspect the finished product of so many months of renovation. In celebration of the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), the platform between northbound and southbound trains has been tricked up with stately columns as well as reproductions of three items from the ROM collection: a totem pole, an Egyptian coffin and something else I cannot identify.

As you sail by on the train, they look fine, but up close they’re cheesy. As Dolly Parton would say, “It takes a lot of money to look this cheap.”

My disappointment matches my dismal view of the ROM’s new Crystal, based on a drawing on a napkin by Daniel Libeskind. The addition looks interesting from the outside, but go inside and it’s impossible to get any sense of spatial perspective. The interior is a series of nooks and crannies with surfaces at so many crazy angles that installation of exhibits is well nigh impossible.

I’ll reserve judgment on the changes by Frank Gehry under way at the Art Gallery of Ontario, but so far it looks like a mall makeover.

I’m a fan of Gehry. We’ve been fortunate to be able to visit Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbao where the interior is just as exciting as the exterior and provides breathtaking space for Richard Serra and other artists. We’ve also seen the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. The design is so compelling we spent an entire morning just walking around and around the outside.

By far the best of Toronto’s recent architectural eruptions is Jack Diamond’s Four Seasons Centre, home to ballet and opera. Viewed at night, from across University Avenue, it’s a magnificent orchestration of glass, metal, wood and light.

As for the Crystal or the AGO, I wouldn’t go around the corner to take a glance. If anyone’s expecting “cultural tourism” to boost the number of visitors to Toronto, the ROM and the AGO aren’t going to do it. If only Ken Thomson had hired Gehry to design a new gallery on the eastern waterfront. Gehry would have had sufficient space to do something terrific, not just for Thomson’s collection, but also for that part of the city that looks like Dresden after the Allied bombing.

My journalism career began in the 1960s when I wrote a high school news column at John F. Ross Collegiate for the Guelph Mercury. I’d sit down at my Smith-Corona typewriter every Sunday night at 9 p.m. (my deadline was Monday morning) and write until I fell asleep.

I was paid nine cents a column inch. On a good week, I could earn $4, enough to take my then girlfriend, now wife, to the movies and then for cherry Cokes and chips with gravy.

The memories came flooding back as I read Denise Rudnicki’s excellent study on the uses of anonymous sources in the Globe and Mail. The first time I ever cited an anonymous source was when I quoted an unnamed friend in one of my columns as saying: “Don’t let schoolwork interfere with your extracurricular activities.”

The morning after publication I was summoned to the office of the principal, Lorne Fox. Fox reamed me out in front of a squirming pair of other students, the president of the student council and the president of the athletic council. Fox said the entire school had been held up to ridicule, teachers’ work had been debased and I was nothing but a ne’er-do-well.

Unlike some situations where finding the name of the anonymous source becomes the focus of everyone’s fury, Fox didn’t care. What mattered to him was the poor impression readers would have of the school. As far as he was concerned, everybody should be punished. The school prom, to be held within days, would be canceled.

In the end, Fox relented. The dance was not cancelled. But he assigned a teacher to read my columns before submission. There was no need. I had learned my lesson. In writing thousands of stories and a dozen books since, I don’t think I’ve cited an anonymous source more than a handful of times.

Nor should anyone else. If someone won’t talk on the record, their comments don’t deserve to be heard. Newspapers as grand as the New York Times have found greasy ways around such a simple rule by allowing writers to quote someone with the slimmest of explanations such as “who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is not allowed to speak on behalf of the candidate.”

Such subterfuge should not be allowed. A reader’s trust is too precious to lose.

We’ve just returned from four days in North Carolina and I can report that the recession has the Northeast in its grip. The only thing that was unchanged, year over year, was the weather. While Toronto suffered in a gloomy 18C, the Outer Banks were a sunny, sultry 33C.

In historic Beaufort, North Carolina, the twelfth town settled in the United States, half of the white clapboard homes on the prime eight-block stretch of Front Street facing the water are for sale. A shop owner told us that a recession always arrives there a year earlier than everywhere else and lasts a year longer. He pegged the beginning of this downturn as occurring a year ago with no end in sight.

Restaurants that have not changed menus and moved to bistro prices are struggling to even be half full. The only places doing well are the likes of Wilber’s, home of the best barbecue in the state. The establishment, opened in 1962, is still going strong in two locations in Goldsboro. Of course, two can eat bellyful combo plates of chicken, pulled pork, potato salad and cole slaw accompanied by constant refills of sweet iced tea for under $20.

You could shoot a cannon from Fort Macon through Nordstrom outside Raleigh. Toronto’s Pearson Airport was all but empty coming and going. Hang on to your hats, it’s going to be a long and bumpy ride.