Author: Rod McQueen

Syd Jackson, CEO of Manufacturer’s Life Insurance Co., was the most playful chief executive officer I’ve ever met. The first time I interviewed him in 1984 he plunked his six-foot-three frame down on his carpeted office floor and bounced around like a boy demonstrating how he received his artillery training. Using his coffee table for a landscape he added various items from his desk to act as mock-up artillery pieces and potential targets. Beyond his fun-loving side, Jackson was one of the first CEOs in Canada to actively promote women with three among his top executives. “It’s not an impressive...

February 2! It’s Groundhog Day. Local radio says the groundhog saw his shadow so there’ll be six more weeks of winter. If the rest of winter is like recent days we’re all going to be stir crazy. But Groundhog Day brought something else to mind – the movie starring Bill Murray, one of my Top Ten films of all time as Groundhog Day keeps repeating for him. He woos a woman and robs an armoured truck among other activities. I got thinking about my top ten movies of all time of which I give Groundhog Day a full-hearted position. Here...

Some of my most vivid memories are seeing musicians live in concert. You know, the kind of shows where for years after you can close your eyes and revisit all the sights and sounds in your mind. Among my favourites is Freddie Mercury at the Canadian National Exhibition in 1980. The slicked-down hair and full moustache were new, but the haughty style was familiar as his vocals scorched through 48 (by my count) speakers. I took my prerogative as managing editor of Maclean’s to get press passes for my son Mark and I so we could stand in the media...

Just when you forgot all your New Year’s resolutions and thought there was nothing else to worry about, along comes a cold-hearted announcement from Ottawa. The Old Age Pension, otherwise known as the pogey, has been increased for 2026 by a piddly 2 percent, less than the rise in the cost of living last year. According to the economic advisory group CanAge, seniors are turning down the heat in their homes and buying expired food to save money. Even the economists at Canada’s six major banks couldn’t come up with anything more positive about the coming year than “cautiously optimistic”...

The house in Guelph where I grew up was on Metcalfe Street opposite St. George’s Park, an idyllic place for an only child like me. If I got tired of indoor games, there was always something to do right out the front door: the swing set across the street. Once, for no reason at all, I took a hammer and a screwdriver from my father’s tool box, walked well into the park, and hammered that screwdriver right into the ground. I never told him and, as far as I know, he never missed that particular screwdriver. I could walk you...

As 2025 draws to an end, I found myself wondering, did I make any predictions in a blog for this year? And if so, how did they turn out? Just as an aside, the previous year I gave myself a 70% mark for that year’s predictions and added: “Not bad for a guy from Guelph.” Even with such a good track record, in fact I ended up making far fewer calls this year. Just as well. My top prediction for 2025 turned out to be totally wrong. “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here,” I began in a February blog....

Funny how your life’s calling comes about. I was ten, doing my morning ablutions on the junior dock at Camp Nagiwa, run by the Guelph YMCA. Junior because it was smaller than the main dock and the water was shallower. Lathered with soap, I dove in and felt my head scrape a rock on the bottom. I stood up, bleeding profusely. Someone got me to the camp’s nursing station then by car to Coldwater, Ont., where a doctor put in stitches. I returned to camp but spiked a fever. My mother drove from Guelph to bring me home. Family doctor...

I first met Gail Scott in the early 1970s when I was press secretary to Robert Stanfield so dealt with her and all members of the Parliamentary Press Gallery. After graduating from Carleton she had spent a year in Paris studying and teaching. As a result when she returned to her birthplace of Ottawa she was fully bilingual. The two dozen Press Gallery reporters from Quebec publications were all bilingual but hardly any of the English-language members of the Press Gallery spoke French. Scott’s other strong points were her manner and reporting skills – first for CBC Radio then CTV....

My son-in-law recently emailed me an interesting missive involving the library in Hamilton, Ont. where he and my daughter live. What he sent was an article published earlier this month in the Hamilton Spectator listing the top ten most popular holds in the Hamilton Public Library system. The most popular hold was an unlimited pass to the Niagara Peninsula Authority NaturePlus. So popular was this pass that the 19 available passes had 582 holds, meaning that anyone who is registered as one of those holds will likely wait months before her/his turn arrives. A similar number of holds cluttered demand...

Some of my favourite songs are about dreams. As it happens, they all come from my youth in the previous century. Here’s my short list of top dream songs: Sweet Dreams by Patsy Cline, Dream Baby by Roy Orbison and Sweet Dreams Are Made of This by The Eurythmics. While all three have dreams described as “sweet” in their titles or opening lines, how sweet are those dreams when you actually listen closely to the lyrics. It’s surprising – not very sweet at all. Patsy Cline’s song about a sometime lover has heartbroken lyrics such as, “You don’t love me,...

Remember those foolish things you did as a kid, sometimes pretending that everything worked well, even when it didn’t? For example, the Wards lived around the corner from me on Parkholm Ave. They had two boys, my friend Jackie and his older brother. The older brother was way more savvy at 12 than Jackie and I were at 8, so it was the 12-year-old who decided to rig up some way of talking to his friend, Denny Sullivan, one street further over. The telephone had been invented, of course, but parents were unhappy when young fry tied up the phone...

When Sir John Craig Eaton died at 46 in 1922, none of his sons was ready to take over Eaton’s, the company his father, Timothy, had founded in 1869. Cousin R. Y. Eaton stepped in until the designated son, John David Eaton, was old enough. I wrote a book, The Eatons, in 1998 so I thought about all this history and more when I read in my morning paper today about fresh plans for the former Eaton’s College Street, first opened in 1930. Lady Eaton, wife of Sir John, and their second son, John David, officiated at those ceremonies. Behind...

Some books are better unread. Some books are better unwritten. Source Code: My Beginnings by Bill Gates is just such a book. You wouldn’t be at all drawn to this book unless you knew the success he had launching Microsoft. Or maybe you’re attracted to the photo of a seven-year-old with a front tooth missing which is what’s on the cover. It wasn’t the photo that drew me, it was the Gates name and the fact that it was billed as an autobiography. Biographies and autobiographies are my favourite genre and my shelves are lined with others including the likes...

I know I’ve previously written about Artificial Intelligence, but, bear with me, my stomach is once more roiling about this nonsense that keeps intruding into our lives. In my morning paper, the Report on Business, was a story announcing that bank CEOs say that AI is already in use in their institutions. According to the article banks are using AI to boost staff productivity, cut costs, combat financial crime and improve customer service. Wow! Isn’t it odd that the CEOs would cite those things, given how poorly the banks appear to be performing in all those areas. “We don’t talk...

Whatever happened to chivalry? My concern is readily visible on almost any street in the country. Rather than see couples walk together, side-by-side, many men are two or three steps ahead of their wife, as if they don’t know her or wish they didn’t. Or perhaps this out-fronter thinks he will look like some snappy male specimen who is single and therefore ready to join with whatever new woman will have him in her life. In his mind the choice grows greater and greater as time passes, such a hunk of humanity is he. You see a similar sort of...