Monthly Archive: September 2013

Time to act

The Ontario Securities Commission has called for submissions on the question why there are too few women in senior management and on corporate boards. Here’s a slightly condensed version of the comment I sent: As a business journalist and author for more than 30 years, I have watched closely and often wrote about the dearth of women on corporate boards and in senior management. Indeed, while at The Financial Post in the early 1990s, I launched an annual feature called The 50 Most Powerful Women in Canada. I saw this as a way not only to recognize the contribution of...

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The Thicke of it

There’s lots good to say about YouTube. Two young Croatian cellists post a Michael Jackson cover and the song goes viral. Elton John calls asking them to open for him on his next tour. Sony offers a record contract. And there was the duo, now called 2Cellos, featured on a PBS special Sunday night playing in Zagreb before thousands of fans. For every such success story, there are a million reasons why YouTube is the worst thing since the bubonic plague, filled as it is with soft and not-so-soft porn. I wouldn’t mind if the porn were just aimed at...

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Fearing for the fourth estate

Time was when I’d annually get a call from a friend who would ask me to talk to their son or daughter about a career in journalism. That generation has grown older so I don’t get the call very often these days. Just as well. For a while, I wasn’t sure what I’d say anymore except, “Are you sure you want to do this? It’s a dying profession.” When I was handing out happier advice, I’d urge them to go work at a provincial daily in Brantford or Kingston or a local TV station in Kitchener or Peterborough. Get published,...

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Shocked and appalled

There’s been a lot of quite appropriate wailing and caterwauling about the Ontario Liberal government’s cancellation of two gas-fired generating plants. The move was calculated to save a couple of seats in the 2011 provincial election. The costs of getting out of the contracts were initially low-balled and could end up reaching almost $600 million. But as Gwyn Morgan wrote in an eye-opening column in The Globe and Mail recently, those costs are chicken-feed compared with the Dalton McGuinty government’s misguided green policy. So desperate was the McGuinty government to look as if it were moving into the modern era...

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What if it’s us?

The Blue Jays have come alive again, winning three in a row, but this time it’s not the big names who are playing well, it’s the call-ups: Kevin Pillar and Ryan Goins – even Moises Sierra – as well as everybody’s fave, Munenori Kawasaki. Oh sure, Brett Lawrie is good on defence and Edwin Encarnacion always helps, but the difference in the team recently is that some new, young guys are playing with intensity. I share a pair of season’s tickets behind the Blue Jays dugout with five others so I get to the park a dozen or so times...

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