Archive for July, 2008

Most days, what’s in the Globe and Mail doesn’t matter very much. There might be a nice piece by Simon Houpt, the New York correspondent, or a witty column by Peggy Wente, but let’s face it: the Globe is a shadow of its former self. The paper breaks little news, has too few investigative features, and doesn’t always include the late ball scores.

But today’s interview by Gord Pitts with RBC’s chief financial officer Janice Fukakusa was particularly revealing. “When we had the first signs of credit crunch a year ago, we were all thinking, ‘This is temporary.’ So we were not putting in a lot of the reporting structure and management information systems that we needed for a sustained view. Every time something came up, we were recreating the wheel,” said Fukakusa.

Rather than sound like the largest bank in Canada, one with an institutional memory - or even an innate conservatism that might stop a bank from sailing off the edge of the world - RBC seemed to be mimicking one of those Alberta-based startups that goes blooey every once in a while.

If that weren’t enough to arouse my ire, how about this? When asked, “Is there a club of major bank CFOs?” Fukakusa replied, “We sit down and have dinner once a quarter. It’s not about competitive stuff, of course, it’s more about: ‘How are you doing this? Why did you hire 10 of my people?’”

And that’s not competitive stuff?

It’s one thing for the bank CEOs to assemble under the auspices of the governor of the Bank of Canada, but there’s no earthly reason for the Big Five Bank CFOs to gather over Dover sole. In the U.S., regulators are digging so deep they are reviewing rumours spread by emails in order to settle roiling markets. In Canada, banks apparently can do whatever they want with impunity, including be unprepared for disaster, so long as the rolls come warm with little pats of butter.

Thank heaven for Erin Burnett at CNBC who may yet save television news from itself. For the time being, she’s stuck in the business ghetto, but will eventually graduate to The Show. Television anchors have been going downhill since David Brinkley retired to shill for Archer Daniels Midland and Dan Rather suffered a credibility crisis after using documents that lacked authenticity in a piece about George Bush’s National Guard service.

What we’re left with is the chipper likes of Katie Couric, who can’t rescue the CBS Evening News, and Lou Dobbs, the Mr. Potato Head of prime time. I used to enjoy Dobbs on Moneyline where he interviewed CEOs and got them to say things others couldn’t. But then he learned he could mobilize public opinion by coming out against the purchase of U.S. ports by an Abu Dhabi firm and has been stoking reactionary causes ever since.
Now he sits, cantilevered with one shoulder lower than the other for dramatic purposes, a sneer on his lips, egging on guests by asking questions that contain the very answer he seeks: “Don’t you think all those illegal aliens should be rounded up tonight and trucked back home?”

Pomposity has also puffed up Matt Frei, BBC World’s presenter in Washington. He began his duties ably enough, but now treats field reporters with disdain, calls female colleagues by their first names (but not their male counterparts), and generally seems to strut even while seated.

As for Canadian anchors, CBC’s Peter Mansbridge is fine. It’s just that I can’t stomach Keith Boag’s Ottawa reports. Boag usually comes up early in the show speaking inanities that could emanate from Omemee for all the insight they contain. Only CTV’s Lloyd Robertson gargles along as always. Pity poor Tom Clark. He’s been waiting in the wings for as long as Prince Charles.

I know, I know, everybody’s RSP is down 10 per cent in the last month, the value of your house has stopped rising for the first time since 1999 and there are lots of factories closing.

So, why is everybody behaving as if nothing’s changed? Yesterday I drove from Toronto to Waterloo and back; today it was a round trip to Buffalo. Nobody’s slowing down to save on gas at $1.35/liter. I’m a conservative driver; 110 km/hr is just fine for me. Most of the traffic whizzed past doing at least 140 km/hr, a velocity at which fuel consumption has got to be high. As for truck traffic, unless all those rigs are running empty, when you’re not doing 140 on 401, you’re doing 14 km/hr because of the huge volumes that are still clogging what continues to be the busiest transportation corridor in North America.

My local Starbucks has line-ups for those fancy new mango smoothies. And high-end U.S. retailer Lord & Taylor is willing to make a bet on Canada’s spending habits by acquiring Hudson’s Bay.

Call it the will-o-the-wisp recession. It’s out there somewhere, but I can’t see it.

Had an email message from an old friend, Bruce Peer, who is traveling in Italy this month. His wife, Cath, is singing with her choir at venues across Italy and he’s tagging along. And what a group of venues they are, beginning with St. Mark’s in Venice and ending with St Peter’s in Rome.

He happened to write from Florence where the choir appeared in Santo Stefano al Ponte, a beautiful church built in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The church, done in the Romanesque style with a polychrome marble fa?ade, has since been deconsecrated and is now used only for musical events.

Our friends had lunch at Gilli in Piazza della Repubblica, the place we met them when they visited the city at the time we lived there. They were staying in Fiesole and had taken the #7 city bus from their hotel. We’d only just arrived a few days earlier for our long-term stay so that was the first we’d heard about the joys of the #7 bus. We took it many times for Fiesole’s tranquility as well as the Roman and Etruscan ruins.

Bruce reported that Florence is hot and crowded, exactly what you’d expect at this time of year, although I have to admit that I was a bit surprised, given the global downturn, that so many people were still traveling.

He did not describe the scene in Piazza della Repubblica during their lunch. But I can imagine it. Across the street those staying at the Savoy would also have been lunching al fresco as tour groups meandered by with each leader holding high a yellow umbrella or piece of red cloth on a stick so the stragglers didn’t get lost. The five Romanians who call themselves Gypsy Show would likely have been entertaining nearby. One of them hammers on the strings of an open-topped zither as if it were a xylophone while his lively colleagues play violin, bass, accordion and guitar. Or it could have been a string quartet offering selections from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. There can also be solo performers: a Russian soprano with a head-set microphone, and two classical guitarists, both with serious miens in keeping with their music. They all seem to have a pact that means only one of them plays at a time. If someone is strumming, the next musician to arrive waits while the first finishes an hour-long set.

No, we weren’t there with Cath and Bruce this time, but it was so easy to go there in our mind’s eye. When people ask how many times we’ve been to Italy, I can honestly say “hundreds.” There’s hardly a day goes by that Sandy and I don’t revel in some aspect of our time there. That’s the draw of Italy. Unlike some places you go, Italy never leaves you.

Our new recycling bin gets rolled out to the street tonight for the first time. It’s the size of our first apartment. What a ridiculous legacy for David Miller, mayor of all the people. Later in the year arrives another equally capacious contraption, this one for garbage. Finding a place to put that monstrosity should be fun.

I’m a fan of recycling. I’ve been composting since I was a small boy. Look up my listing in the 1989 Who’s Who and you’ll see composting listed as a recreation along with country walks. For years I’ve been separating eggshells, coffee grounds, carrot scrapings, why I even went so far as to remove the Dole labels from the banana peels knowing that they take a thousand years to disintegrate. (Are you reading this, G2?)

Then one day last month, I happened to be in the garden when I heard the garbage truck come. I thought, well, I’ll go and bring in my empty green bin. I got there in time to watch the garbage man dump the contents of the green bin into the open maw of the vehicle where all the bagged garbage went. There wasn’t even the slightest attempt to fool me that something special was happening to all my careful sorting.

When we lived in Washington, D.C., the city launched recycling of newspapers. Months passed before the Washington Post discovered the papers weren’t being recycled at all, they were just being dumped in a pit. I thought, oh well, that government is corrupt. The City of Toronto is worse; it’s incompetent.

Mayor Miller blew onto the scene in 2003 with such promise but he’s no better a leader than the embarrassing Mel Lastman or, for that matter, William Dennison from the 1960s. It was Dennison who once met with an African leader, signed a document, and presented him with the pen, announcing, “This is a ball point pen.” The visiting dignitary informed Dennison he was familiar with the device from his time at Oxford.

Mayor Miller, this is my bag of garbage. Do with it what you will.

A friend is taking his family to Florence this month. When he asked what they should see, Sandy and I told him about the many obvious sights: Ponte Vecchio, Michelangelo’s David at Accademia, Renaissance art at the Uffizi (be sure to book advance tickets to save yourself a two-hour wait on line), the Duomo and the Baptistery, and the Central Market.

But we also made our top ten suggestions. Here they are for all to enjoy:

1. Gilli, a restaurant in Piazza Della Repubblica. At mid-morning, order an espresso or caffe latte and choose a pastry. Our favorite was the bombolone. At lunch, eat outside. Have the ni?oise salad. Listen to the musicians nearby. (We lived just two blocks away at Via Roma 3.)
2. Museo dell’Opera del Duomo. Everybody wants to see the Duomo but inside the cathedral is mostly just a big empty space, unless you feel up to climbing all 463 steps to the top. (Brunelleschi’s bones are on the lower level.) All the good art is in the Museo dell’Opera which is behind the Duomo. See the bronze doors from the Baptistery (the ones outside are reproductions) as well as Michelangelo’s Pieta and Donatello’s haunting Mary Magdalene carved out of wood.
3. Gregorian chants at 5 p.m. by the Benedictine monks at San Miniato del Monte. Take a taxi for the 15-minute ride to the church south of Florence; have bus tickets for the ride back to town via city bus #12 that passes in front of the church. Wonderful cemetery out back. Great views of Florence from the church and from Piazzale Michelangelo part way down the hill. Bus tickets cost about a euro each and are available at any tabachi (tobacconist). Stick your ticket in the slot when you board for a time stamp. Hang onto the tickets during the ride in case you are asked.
4. Verrazano on Via Dei Tavolini for lunch or pastries. Across the street, Perch? Non? (Why not?) for the best gelato in Florence.
5. Celestino, a great restaurant in the Piazza Santa Felicita, just south of Ponte Vecchio. Take a look at the Pontormo, just to the right inside of the door of the church, for modern colors and shapes in this unusual Deposition scene.
6. The Boboli Gardens behind the Pitti Palace. A long walk on a hot day up to the top but a rewarding trip for views and the gallery of ceramics.
7. If you’re in Florence on the last Sunday of the month, there’s an antique market on the streets around the Piazza dei Ciompi, half a dozen blocks east of the Duomo. Everything from chandeliers to Nazi memorabilia. At the north end of the market, on Via Petrapiana, is a pastry shop, Nencioni, where you want to buy fedora, the best pastry we’ve ever tasted in any country (rum-soaked cake and whipped cream encased in dark chocolate curls).
8. Take the #7 city bus from Piazza San Marco, a ten-minute walk north on Via Cavour from the Duomo. It’s a half-hour trip up the hill to Fiesole, a small village with views of Florence as well as a Roman amphitheatre and Etruscan ruins. If money’s no object, have dinner at Villa San Michele, the best dining in Florence.
9. Piazza della Santissima Annunziata for architecture including Spedale degli Innocenti, the first orphanage in Europe. Piazza Santo Spirito, south of the Arno, for city life. Walk west along Via di Santo Spirito for artisans, wine shops and restaurants.
10. The Bargello, on Via Della Proconsolo, Italy’s first national museum. Michelangelo on the main floor, Donatello’s David on the second floor. Magnifico!