Yearly Archive: 2013

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

Half a dozen years ago, I attended a corporate reception in Montreal. The catered event in a beautiful venue featured business leaders, famous people, and – with the exception of a four-minute speech by the Toronto-based CEO – was conducted totally in French. I was okay with that. Most of the remarks during the 90-minute program had little to do with the organization that has offices around the world, they were just the usual boring blather of self-congratulation. Still, I saw the full use of French as a remarkable and positive outcome of Bill 101 that demonstrated the self-confidence of Quebec businesspeople....

One of my favorite reads in The Globe and Mail is the Clarification/Correction column. Newspapers today are far more likely to admit errors, anything from misspelled words to major whoops. A correction yesterday referred to a story that I hadn’t read (another reason to check the clarifications) about the Nestle operation in Aberfoyle, Ont., where they pump drinking water out of the ground and fill plastic bottles. Aberfoyle is a spit-and-a-holler south of Guelph where I grew up. When I was a boy, Guelph’s water came from the Arkell Springs, about half way between the Royal City and Aberfoyle. At...

By far the best book of the season is This Town, a skewering of the Washington, D.C., elite. Written by Mark Leibovich, national correspondent for The New York Times Magazine, the book arrives with a long subtitle: Two Parties and a Funeral – plus plenty of valet parking! – in America’s Gilded Capital. In fact there are two funerals, one for Tim Russert, erstwhile host of Meet the Press, the other for Richard Holbrooke. Both events are described in vicious detail, right down to how people arrived wearing studio-ready pancake makeup. Barack Obama was the first of fifteen eulogists for...

This summer’s Shakespeare in High Park offers two plays, Macbeth and The Taming of the Shrew, in an outdoor setting that’s close to the action. I saw The Taming of the Shrew last night and can report that it’s a popular romp of a production that drew a sellout crowd including lots of families with young children. I am not sure, however, that it is family fare. The Taming of the Shrew has never been among my favourite Shakespearean plays. While the work has spawned Broadway and other iterations, its theme of taking the rebellious Kate and bending her into...

The rest of Canada hates Toronto, right? The venom is so virulent that it infects Torontonians who debunk their city as riddled with gridlock, run by a boor, has an affront for a waterfront and can’t mount a professional team that’s a winner. (Except for the Argos and they don’t count.) In recent days I’ve read disparaging things about the Ted Rogers statue at the Rogers Centre, a restaurant where the chef spent too much time in the front of the house and, of course, the weather. There’s always something wrong with the weather: too humid, too cold at night,...

What is it about women that they will forgive their husbands any peccadillo? According to New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, the reason Huma Abedin continues to support and remain with Internet sleaze Andrew Weiner is that she was raised in Saudi Arabia where women are taught to toe the line. But that doesn’t explain why Ms. Abedin’s former boss, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, stayed with Bill, her serial philandering husband. Hilary was born and raised in Chicago. Chicago is also the setting for The Good Wife, the popular evening soap starring Julianna Margulies, who stood by her man,...

The $12-billion takeover of Shoppers Drug Mart by Loblaws has much to recommend it. First, shareholders are happy, particularly Shoppers shareholders who are up more than 20 per cent. Loblaws and George Weston (I hold the latter) have risen less than 4 per cent on the news, but still, every bit helps. Second, according to the information released at the time of the announcement, there will be $300 million in cost savings by the third year of the merged entity. Third, it’s an all-Canadian deal, and I’m always in favour of home-grown. On the downside, another publicly owned Canadian firm...

I finally watched the six shows I taped that first aired July 1 on CPAC when Catherine Clark interviewed all six living former prime ministers for her show, Beyond Politics. What a concept! What a disappointment! Too much time is spent during each of the 30-minute sessions rummaging around in the younger years of the men. (More about the only woman, Kim Campell, in a moment.) In the case of Catherine’s father, Joe, as well as John Turner, Brian Mulroney, Jean Chretien, and Paul Martin Jr., the questions too often let the PMs talk about familiar ground: Clark as a...

The announcement by Marjory LeBreton that she is resigning as Government Leader in the Senate brings to an end – almost – one of the longest-serving working lives – 50 years – of anyone on Parliament Hill. I say almost because she will continue to sit as a Senator for another two years before retiring at 75. Marjory demonstrates the classic case of how women in her generation got ahead. They started at the bottom and worked their way up by dint of sheer effort, moxie and common sense, characteristics she has in abundance. Marjory started working for the Progressive...

I’ve been fortunate over the years to travel tens of thousands of miles in Canada. There’s more yet to see, but here are a few of my favourite sights so far. The steep streets of St. John’s with colourful houses tipping into the sea. The best nap ever one afternoon on the sloping grass outside the Hotel Goose in Gander. A double rainbow over Keltic Lodge after driving Cape Breton’s Cabot Trail. Irish Coffee in the Victory Bar of the Lord Nelson Hotel one unusually cold day in July. The two evocative sites near St. Margaret’s Bay commemorating the crash...