Rod McQueen's Blog, page 11

Into a Tiff

Surprise! Inflation’s no longer a problem. At least that’s what analysts were saying after the stock market rose sharply at the end of the week. New York was up more than 5 percent during the last two trading days and Toronto was up slightly less. In the U.S., in October, the consumer price index was up 7.7 percent year-over-year, marking the fourth straight month of slowdown.
In Canada, the Bank of Canada’s Tiff Macklem, our man at the inflation helm, has not quite declared an end to rate hikes, but he has found a new foe: employment. Macklem declared that the labour market is getting too hot now that unemployment has reached record lows and business is having a hard time finding workers. What will this man blame next for our economic woes? School marks?
Beyond the announced numbers, how bad is inflation for the average family? When I come home from shopping, I always throw my receipts in a drawer. I looked at my pile this week and found they stretched back to mid-August. Aha, I thought, I’ll pore through these and find gouging price increases at City Market, a Loblaws outlet where I shop. Other than some price bounce-around for seasonal apples, I found no egregious increases. In fact, I was astounded to find no increases at all!
Gas prices are down; the only place I can find day-to-day inflation is on restaurant tips. Those devices the waiter hands you to pay your bill offer a cash or percentage tip on the total. If you choose percentage, the first three choices are 18, 20, and 22 percent followed by “other.” Whatever happened to the traditional 15 percent? Maybe it’s that kind of errant manoeuvring that has driven Macklem to seek his impossible goal of 2 percent annual inflation.
I recently came across a book I read in high school: The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy. The price on the fly leaf was $1.40. I went to the Bank of Canada inflation calculator and found that the 1962 price would be $14 today. Since today’s bookstore is likely selling the equivalent hardcover version for twice that, I can only assume profit margins in the book business are much better than they used to be. 
More relevant to the current discussion, the inflation rate from 1962 to 2022 was shown as 3.84 percent. Where does Macklem come up with his go-for-broke goal of 2 percent? Yet neither he nor anyone else is saying there won’t be a recession, now that inflation has peaked. I find inflation so mysterious that I don’t think any such conclusions are possible. 

 

 

 

A Ford in the driveway

I’m going to declare up front my position on Ontario Premier Doug Ford. I’ve never liked him and I probably never will. Mind you, he’s a better man than he was during those early days in office when his idea of being in power was riding around the province enthroned in some kind of hopped-up RV. Better, but only slightly.
It’s hard to know where to begin in my litany of foolish proposals, but let’s start with his plan for a roadway that impinges upon the Niagara Escarpment, a wonder of nature that countless citizens maintain and enjoy trekking along the Bruce Trail. “Let’s start paving,” is Ford’s answer to those would dare disagree. Or the Bradford bypass, the signs for which show up on Highway 400 well north of Toronto, carefully marking the farmer’s field where one day more paving will occur. Bradford has a population of 35,000. You can see, of course, why they need a bypass.
Think back to previous Progressive Conservative Premiers such as John Robarts and Bill Davis. If you lived in Ontario during their time, you must surely agree that Ford is not half the man that either of them were. Yet there Ford was eulogizing about Davis in the Legislature last week. Surely a more suitable orator could have been found among the party’s backbenchers.
As for Ford’s cabinet, the only minister for whom I have any praise is Peter Bethlenfalvy, minister of finance. He is of Hungarian heritage and I heard him speak recently about his immigrant background. Twice he had to stop, pause, and gather himself, he spoke so emotionally about the travails of his forbears. As a former journalist, I can be skeptical about such tactics from the podium by politicians, but I believe that in his case his feelings were heartfelt.
More mystifying to me than Ford’s inability to attract other intelligent members to caucus is his insistence that he will not testify before the Emergencies Act inquiry. To my knowledge, no one else has refused. Who does Ford think he is? Steve Bannon?
To be sure, Ford is popular with the people. In his recent re-election, Ford flipped nine seats in the 905 region his way. But here’s what I believe. Thirty years from now, the people of that time and place will not praise the hapless Doug Ford or the sad legacy he left. 

Views on the news

I don’t watch the news nearly as much as I used to. Does anyone? Drones in the Ukraine, the convoy, floods in Pakistan, students shot in the classroom, lockdowns, hurricanes. I’m sorry to say that such travesties have become so regular that they all run into one another. When I do watch the evening television news, it is certainly not CTV, my former mainstay. Some executive’s ageist and sexist comments caused Lisa LaFlamme to lose her job and I disappeared at the same time. 
I might watch the first ten minutes of The National but CBC News is not what it used to be. Once a commercial comes along, I’m gone. However, I must declare that having just one host is a vast improvement over the four-headed monster that CBC created a few years back.
What does all this say about me, a career journalist and author? I’m not looking for fuzzy-wuzzy news about racoons caught in balustrades or footage of a large dog nuzzling a baby. But I am tired of what’s presented, oftentimes by reporters who are nowhere near the scene, and are just repeating what everyone else is saying. Of course, that’s always safe. At least your boss can’t complain you missed something. 
At lot of the trouble flows because we hear online bits and pieces throughout the day from, say, Apple News. By the time you hear the news at night, everything already seems old. Only the CBC’s Tom Walters seems able to put a new spin on things. The American networks at 6:30 are too U.S.-centric. CNN has more panels than a wooden shed. Where to turn?
For the moment, I turn to nature: sunsets, a full moon, fall walks, the conjunction of Jupiter and Neptune, and a good book. I’m currently re-reading Robert Caro’s series on Lyndon Johnson. I’m in volume four, right at the point where Jack Kennedy was assassinated, Johnson assumed office, and gave his first speech to Congress. And I’m waiting for Caro’s much-promised fifth and final volume. Three years ago, when Caro published his memoir, Working, I thought it meant volume five was almost ready. Another publishing season is upon us with no Johnson book apparent. But with such sights as I’ve described all around me, and someone’s graceful words in my head, I can survive and thrive. Without the news.

A bookish look

Indigo is celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary. As an author, I say congratulations to Gerry Schwartz and Heather Reisman for sticking with this investment in a difficult business. At my go-to Indigo, the biggest promotional poster shows Margaret Atwood sitting amongst flowers and is described as a “writer, advocate, and birdwatcher.” Notice the comma after advocate. That’s called an “Oxford comma” because it is used with a series of words in books while in normal newspaper usage it would not appear. 
Alternating with Atwood is a video poster of rupi kaur (the lower case is accurate) who is described as a “poet, activist, artist.” In this modern world, her fame came through social media. Atwood is further displayed on another video poster inside the store with her hand to her cheek, eyes closed, and the words, “Stories connect us.”
I can understand why Indigo has highlighted Atwood. Over the years, Indigo has probably sold more books by Atwood than any other Canadian author. Maybe more Atwood books than all Canadian authors combined. The sad fact is that Canadians don’t buy enough Canadian books. Independent publishers in Canada annually produce about three-quarters of all new titles but only account for about five percent of sales. The lion’s share of the market goes to the foreign-owned multinationals for whom Canadian books can be little more than an afterthought.
With that in mind, how much better it would have been for Indigo to focus its twenty-fifth anniversary campaign on half a dozen Canadian authors each of whom has a new book out this fall and deserves more attention. I can’t give you any names because I never heard of them – that’s why I want Indigo to tell me.
The other longer-running problem I have with Indigo is that books have become less and less important as those twenty-five years have passed. First they added a few cards and wrapping paper, then some boxed items, followed by tea cosies and who-knows-what. Newly appointed Indigo CEO Peter Ruis talks about how much he loves books but told Financial Post that he plans to create a “cultural odyssey of a store.” Coming as he does from Urban Outfitters and Anthropologie, I can figure out what that means. More stuff on the shelves that’s not books. But if that’s the price we have to pay so Indigo continues to carry books, then so be it. 

The Queen and I

While watching the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II in recent days, I realized I must be a full-blown monarchist. How could I be anything else? I was born and raised in Guelph, the Royal City, lived across from St. George’s Park, patron saint of England, and attended King George Public School. 
When the Queen was crowned in 1953, film of the coronation in Westminster Abbey was flown by the RAF and RCAF to Canada for broadcast on CBC. Hardly anyone had television in those days, so the neighbourhood gathered in the auditorium of the aforementioned school and watched the ceremony later that same day on televisions placed strategically on stands, one on each of the four walls. 
I first saw the Queen in person in 1959 when she visited Guelph. I read somewhere recently that she asked on that occasion why Guelph was called the Royal City. I can’t imagine she didn’t already know that the city was named by its founder, John Galt, in 1827, using the medieval German House of Guelfs, the ancestral family of George IV. The name had not been previously used as a place name.
Her Majesty was accompanied by Prince Philip. I went with my parents to a good spot on London Road (where else?) as they passed by in a convertible. A neighbour family had an even better view. They’d brought along a step ladder so all their kids could clamber up. The fact that they were American did not stop them from enjoying the parade that included local Member of Parliament, Alf Hales, the Guelph Pipe Band, and a passel of Navy cadets, among other participants.
While living in England from 1987-1988, my late wife and I were included in the guest list of invitees to the annual garden party at Buckingham Palace. All you usually see of the palace is the massive stone front, but there is a garden out back that must be a half a mile long and a quarter of a mile wide. The several hundred guests formed a large horseshoe. The Queen, Philip, Prince Charles and Lady Di worked their way along the inside of the formation. You couldn’t reach out, but you waited, and every so often a member of the Royal Family would stop and chat with someone. We weren’t picked, but we had up-close looks.
So when an estimated 250,000 people lined up for hours to pay their respects to the Queen last weekend, I didn’t need to to be there. I’ve been in the line all my life.

Cause and effect

Poor Tiff Macklem, governor of the Bank of Canada. Today he boosted interest rates to 3.25 percent from 2.5 percent and the TSX managed to rise only 150 points, about the same as yesterday’s downturn. Analysts yawned even though rates in Canada are now higher than almost every nation from New Zealand to Sweden. Macklem is the Rodney Dangerfield of central bankers.
The name “Tiff” comes from Macklem’s middle name, Tiffany. He has a PhD in economics and was for six years dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. It was there I saw him a few years ago at an event billed as a speech by former prime minister Paul Martin followed by a question-and-answer session.
The event was seared into my mind because it seemed to me that Macklem turned it into more of a showcase for himself than his guest. Macklem remains his best press agent. He makes regular appearances on BNN Bloomberg and in August wrote opinion pieces for National Post and La Presse. For all his effort he’s not even a household name in his own household.
Macklem was appointed governor in 2020 to replace Stephen Poloz, the man who got the nod for governor over Macklem in 2013. Before Poloz was another winner, Mark Carney, who began his seven-year term in 2008 but left after five-and-a-half years to become governor of the Bank of England. When that prize post ended, Carney wrote a bestselling book, joined one among the many Brookfield companies, and is about to become chair of Brookfield Asset Management Ltd. where he’ll make gobs of money.
To be sure, Macklem has been occupied with international finance for decades. There’s a photo showing him with U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson at a meeting of G7 finance ministers. The photo was taken on October 10, 2008, when they acted boldly so there would be no more investment firms like Lehman Brothers going bankrupt.
But Macklem looks like he’s lost that past bravado. Early in his term as governor, Macklem mistakenly said that inflation would stay under 2 percent. Last year he appeared paralyzed while inflation rose to 6 percent. In the last six months he has triggered five hikes. After doing too little in the early going, what if he’s doing too much too late? If a recession arrives in Canada, we’ll never know whether he saw it coming or caused it.

Women’s work

The departure of Lisa LaFlamme as anchor of CTV News reeks of ageism and sexism. A senior male executive from Bell Media, owners of CTV, was heard deriding her grey hair as if that were sufficient criteria for firing her. Oh yes, there was another problem. LaFlamme and her producer fought with their superiors to be able to send journalists to international events such as Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum Jubilee. Such cheek!
This abusive treatment is nothing new. As an author and journalist I have been writing about the poor treatment of women in the workplace for decades. In 2000, for example, I sought to raise the profile of successful women in business by Iaunching an annual feature called the National Post Power Fifty. During a three-month period, I conducted dozens of interviews to identify the most powerful women in Canada where power was defined as “the ability to influence people and events.” I made certain that all economic sectors and regions of the country were represented. I did a full ranking, interviewed the top twenty, and wrote the 10,000-word feature that accompanied the list. Number one on the list in that inaugural year was Suzanne Labarge, vice chair and chief risk officer at Royal Bank.
Other women have worked equally hard and long, but with less success. According to a study by Toronto law firm Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt, in 2021 women held only 23.4 percent of board seats among companies listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange, up a mere two percentage points from the previous year. At that rate of increase, it will take another thirteen years for boards to be 50-50 female-male. Growth of female executives at TSE companies has been worse. At the executive level, women occupy only 18.2 percent of positions, up from 17 percent in 2020. According to the Osler survey, that’s hardly any increase since 2015 when it was 15 percent. Annual growth of one percentage point means that executive women and men won’t be in balance until 2053. At the very top, there are less than a dozen female CEOs among the more than 200 TSE companies.
To my mind, equally disconcerting is the fact that women on the way up who appear in newspaper appointment ads are nearly always good-looking. It’s as if male executives are willing to work with a woman as long as she’s attractive. Yet homely men make it to the top all the time. Homely women, apparently, get left behind. There’s also the issue of talent. Just as homely men make it to the top, so do mediocre men. The day when a mediocre woman is named CEO will mark tangible success in the long climb to equality.

Questions, questions

Back in the day when I was a cub reporter at the London Free Press, I learned a saying from Doug Bale, the newspaper’s theatre critic. It went like this: “I keep six honest serving men, they taught me all I knew, their names are what and why and when and how and where and who.” Bale, who wore a cravat, was quite a dandy by comparison to the others in the newsroom. I later learned that he was quoting a poem by Rudyard Kipling, but it did not take away from what he taught me about how to write a news story. The words were an important lesson about life, too, namely, always be curious, and ask questions about what’s happening around you.
In that vein, my first question today is this: Why don’t I read a lot more about Justin Trudeau’s abysmal 34 percent approval rating? The American media constantly reminds us that President Joe Biden’s approval rating has sunk to 38 percent. Nor did I see any Canadian media have some fun with Trudeau’s haircut. In the U.K, The Guardian had photos of Justin and actor Jim Carrey looking silly on the front page but there was no such light-hearted approach here. The Canadian media seems cowed by Trudeau, just like they were by his father, even though Justin is half the man Pierre was.
On another topic, who sets gas prices at the pump? Six weeks ago, regular gas was $2.06 per litre. Then it was announced prices would come down in steps by 20 cents a litre. And so they did, all the way to $1.59 only to bounce up and down and settle in yesterday around $1.66. How does every gas station in town and beyond know when to bump it up or down by four, five or six cents overnight? Is special notice given via some online portal? Is there a cartel? Why does no level of government investigate this price fixing?
Question number three involves Pierre Poilievre. Why do I have such trouble spelling and pronouncing his name? Maybe it’s because he is a despicable man. Not because he wants to fire the governor of the Bank of Canada or bring in crypto currency, but because he brings out the worst in people. That’s not what leadership is all about, leadership is about bringing people together, bringing out the best in people, building relationships and communities. I can only hope he falls on his face, otherwise all we’ll be left with is another question: Why did we let him get away with it?

The golden thumb

Laurie Bennett showed me how to hitchhike. We were both bellhops at Britannia Hotel on Lake of Bays in 1963. Ben, who remains a good friend, wanted to get home to Meaford to see his girlfriend. I tagged along, promised a blind date. Neither of us had a car, so at his urging, we set out to hitchhike. The twenty minutes to Huntsville was an easy ride along with someone from the hotel. But so was the remainder. We’d hardly put out a thumb when we were on our way to Barrie, then across Highway 26 to Meaford. The travel time was about the same as driving ourselves. I was astounded.
Over the next few months, I put my newfound skill to good use as I went to my hometown of Guelph as well as hither and yon. Sometimes I’d have a hand-lettered sign saying, “Student to Huntsville,” but for the most part just stuck out a hopeful thumb. Most of the rides were with men on their own. Maybe they were looking for company. Only once did I feel awkward. A man talked a lot about a bellhop he knew at the Royal York Hotel who seemed to have homosexual tendencies but that was as bad as things ever got.
During the next summer, when I worked in the newsroom at the London Free Press, I wrote an article about what I called “riding the golden thumb.” The feature was given great play and stretched all the way across the bottom of a section front. Hitchhiking was popular at the time but a few years later seemed to fade. Perhaps more young people had cars or maybe the world got riskier.
In 1967, my final year at Western, I was interviewed on campus by the head of personnel at Maclean Hunter. Our talk seemed to go well but I never heard back. I decided one night to go to Toronto the next morning and present myself at his office to precipitate an answer. I had only enough cash in hand for a one-way train ticket and arrived at his office at 9 a.m. He set up appointments with four other colleagues and I was hired, the only graduate they took on that year. I had just enough money left to take the subway north as close as I could to Highway 401, walked to the highway, and hitched a ride back in good time for my 5:30 p.m. evening shift at the Free Press. The Golden Thumb never worked better. 

The golden thumb

Laurie Bennett showed me how to hitchhike. We were both bellhops at Britannia Hotel on Lake of Bays in 1963. Ben, who remains a good friend, wanted to get home to Meaford to see his girlfriend. I tagged along, promised a blind date. Neither of us had a car, so at his urging, we set out to hitchhike. The twenty minutes to Huntsville was an easy ride with someone from the hotel. But so was the remainder. We’d hardly put out a thumb when we were on our way to Barrie, then across Highway 26 to Meaford. The travel time...