In 1976, when I left the Ottawa office of Opposition Leader Robert Stanfield, I tried to get back into journalism, but no one would have me. I guess they all thought I would somehow promote Tory propaganda in my stories. So I became director of public affairs at the Bank of Nova Scotia. I reported to Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Cedric Ritchie so I had a first-hand look at the power politics that dominates the internal affairs of any large corporation. Among the rising stars was Peter Godsoe who had a Harvard MBA and was working his way ever...
What has happened to the scallywags of yesteryear? You know who I’m talking about, those high-flying, job-creating entrepreneurs who always seemed to be mouthing off on topics about which they knew nothing. They were in-your-face outlandish spenders with the latest private jet, a palace in the Caribbean, and women draped all over them. Take Nelson Skalbania, for example, who loved to gamble, owned the Vancouver Canucks and the Calgary Flames among other teams, several fine cars, a yacht, artwork, and tore down many a mansion as he bounced through a variety of sectors including forestry, air cargo, and an engineering...
When Darcy McKeough, former Treasurer of Ontario, talked to me about helping with his memoirs, he said he’d done some work. You never know what that means: a few scrawled recollections or maybe a stack of newspaper clippings. For McKeough, it was a three-inch-thick binder with 1,200 double-spaced typed pages – 601,189 words in all. I told McKeough that the average published book had 256 pages and ran to 75,000 words. Moreover, I would be interviewing friends, colleagues, and family for additional information and anecdotes so that more than 90 percent of what he’d written wasn’t going to make it...
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