Yearly Archive: 2014

I had occasion recently to see a doctor at a clinic. (Spoiler alert: I’m fine.) Because it was a teaching hospital, the doctor was accompanied by another doctor and four residents, all eager to learn. You feel like a bit of a guinea pig, sitting there in your socks and hospital gown that’s impossible to tie up, while the doctor uses you to show the residents symptoms you do or do not have. Finally, he gets around to what you came for: the diagnosis. Afterward, I got thinking, why don’t other institutions and corporations follow a similar methodology? We have...

Canada’s newest billionaire is Frank Hasenfratz, founder and chairman of Linamar Corp. Linamar share price at the close of trading today was $65.41 which means his 15.3 million shares are worth $1 billion. The number is all the more remarkable given that those shares were worth $750 million just three months ago. Hasenfratz, the focus of a book written in 2012 by Susan M. Papp and me, Driven to Succeed, founded Linamar in 1966. He had a lathe, for which he paid $1,000, that he operated in the basement of his home. As the sole employee his first contract was...

As a former winner of the National Business Book Award (1997 for Who Killed Confederation Life?) I always keep a close eye on the annual prize. The award has been around since 1986 and the belief always was that it was rigged in that you couldn’t win twice. This year’s winner proved that old shibboleth wrong. The award went to Jacquie McNish and Jim Leech for The Third Rail, a book about pensions, not the sexiest topic ever. McNish previously won in 2004 for Wrong Way: The Fall of Conrad Black. She had a collaborator then, too, in Sinclair Stewart. It’s...

I’ve had occasion this month to travel to two different cities in southern Ontario. The names are irrelevant, the stories are the same as a lot of other places. Let’s call them B and C. After I’d parked my car in a municipal lot in B and was walking to my destination five minutes away, the first person I passed said, “Good morning.” I thought, “Well, I’m not in Toronto any more.” When I checked out of the automated lot two hours later, I knew for sure I was somewhere else. The total charge was $2.  In city C I...

The appointment today of Anne Marie Owens as editor of National Post, the first woman ever to head a Canadian national newspaper, raises the question: how will a member of the fair sex fare in the role? It’s hard not to think about the recent firing of Jill Abramson as editor of the New York Times. Media specialist Ken Auletta, who wrote more knowledgeably about the dismissal than anyone else, said one of the reasons was because Abramson was seen by management as “pushy.”  Pushy. What a word. It’s only used about a woman, never a man. Owens, currently deputy...

I recently attended an open house at my granddaughter’s school. There was a fascinating tour of the school conducted by my granddaughter, who is in Grade Four, that included the library, art room and a computer facility where they can make their own videos. I also saw her math notebooks, heard poetry, inspected a history project and heard a lot of unfamiliar wordage such as “unit of inquiry” that seemed to mean an essay or project. Some of the units of inquiry looked pretty complicated for her age, but she pulled everything off with aplomb. What an education our young...

Colm Feore is a magnificent King Lear at Stratford. My daughter Alison and I attended the first of the preview performances today and came away overwhelmed by his portrayal of the character. The play doesn’t officially open until May 26 and runs until October. My only concern is that it will be difficult for Feore to maintain the intensity that he displayed today over such a sustained period of almost 50 outings.  Scott Wentworth’s Gloucester is also excellent as is Edgar, his legitimate son, played by Evan Buliung. The rest of the cast is good too and the costuming is...

There’s long been a debate about public incentives for private sector projects. Otherwise profitable companies come to governments, cap in hand, demanding funds or they’ll build a new plant in some other more favourable jurisdiction.  Automotive is a prime example. In 1978, Ford President Roy Bennett tracked down Ontario Premier Bill Davis and Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, who were both attending the Calgary Stampede. Bennett convinced them to invest $68 million in an engine plant in Windsor, Ont., that might have gone to Ohio instead. In 1986, Toyota got $50 million from Ontario Premier David Peterson for a new assembly...

The sudden announcement by Gerry McCaughey yesterday that he’s stepping down as CEO of CIBC should come as no surprise. In fact, life at the top of Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce has always been about as unpredictable as it has been unproductive. Despite all the modernization CIBC has gone through in the last four decades the corporate culture of the place remains unchanged. All banks are political, but CIBC is like the Vatican.  The story begins in 1969 when Gordon Sharwood was reading his morning paper and discovered that his colleague Russ Harrison had been named to the number two...

The recent deaths of Jim Flaherty and Herb Gray tell us something about the state of politics in this country. Flaherty was unique in the Stephen Harper cabinet. He was someone who cared about his role as finance minister, gave his all, and didn’t take himself too seriously. When I look at the rest of the cabinet, I don’t see very many others with Flaherty’s breadth or gravitas. In the 1970s, when I was working in Ottawa and saw Herb Gray up close, he was a study in contrasts. By all boring appearances he was the least interesting member of...

As I watched Adam Scott place the green jacket on this year’s Master’s winner, Bubba Watson, I was taken with the resonance of this annual event. It could be just another golf tournament but it has been infused with lore and made lustrous with legend. The CBS announcers have sombre voices as they talk reverently about Amen Corner and the Eisenhower tree. There’s endless footage of Arnie and Jack and Gary walking on stone bridges. And of course the scenery, complete with rhododendrons and azaleas plus the sound of Carolina Wrens amid the loblolly pines. The Americans do sports so well:...

Apparently it’s tough being the editor of a newspaper. In recent days, both the editor of National Post, Stephen Meurice, and the editor of The Globe and Mail, John Stackhouse, have departed. I’m surprised the Post is still alive under any editor. When I left in 2001, I didn’t think it would last a year, but survive it has. The Globe is struggling, too, but not to the same money-losing extent. Part of that battle seems to be the incapacity to keep editors-in-chief in harness. Phillip Crawley has been publisher of the Globe since 1999. The latest editor to come...

He called me professore, which I wasn’t. I called him dottore, which he was. Peter Porcal died last Friday, March 28, 2014. I’m guessing he was somewhere in his late 60s. Even when Sandy and I first met him in Florence in 2004, he wasn’t in the best of health. Too many years of walking Tuscany with his “children,” as he liked to call his students, had taken a terrible toll on his knees. I wasn’t the only one with a nickname. There was a young man who could have been a putto, he was so pretty. To his discredit,...

The opening last night of the latest works by Michael Awad was spectacular. A dozen pieces at the Nicholas Metivier Gallery feature a range of urban sites and events from house boats in Britain to the lineup for turkeys at Honest Ed’s, all done in Awad’s inimitable cinematic style of horizontal free-frame motion. The colours in Caribbean Parade could be brush work in oils. Some of the works in the solo exhibit called The Entire City Project 2014 are the product of a weekend of photography, plus untold hours to arrange the results on 20 square feet of framed display....

Alison Redford’s departure as premier of Alberta was predictable. Of course, she brought it upon herself by charging personal items to official expenses. But even without such behaviour, the good old boys would have done her in at some point. It’s not easy being a woman in charge of men, least of all Alberta Conservatives. Little has changed in the macho Alberta legislature since the 1970s when Peter Lougheed and Don Getty and others who’d all played football together were in charge. As recently as last summer a new world order had supposedly arrived; there were six female premiers. Then...