Rod McQueen's Blog, page 12

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...

The trouble with Canadian retailing

On a trip to the U.S. in March 1994, I stopped at the Wal-Mart store in Meadville, Pa. to inspect the outfit that was coming to Canada after buying 120 Woolco stores from Woolworth Canada. Inside the door, a cheerful employee greeted me and offered a shopping cart. The place was well lit, aisles were wide, stock neatly displayed. Some prices were as much as half off. An employee near me carrying what looked like a Flash Gordon ray gun zapped a product barcode with a laser beam. With little prompting, she proudly showed me how the readout gave her...

Rogers dodgers

During the extended Rogers outage on Friday, I happened to drive past the two main buildings that form the company’s head office. There’s a permanent sign on the north building that reads “Rogers: Canada’s biggest and most reliable 5G network.” Well, as we all now know, that’s a bit of a nose-stretcher. For the second time in two years, Rogers was down. Clients were still coming back aboard today after twenty-four hours without service. Phone calls, debit and credit payments, calls to 911, Interac transfers, text messages and emails were all affected. Who knew that Rogers commanded such heights? Or...

The real meaning of pur laine

I’ve read a lot about Quebec’s latest controversial laws, Bills 21 and 96, but I don’t think the explanation for their existence has been complete. But before I say what I believe is the cause of these attacks on minorities, let’s look at what’s happened in what all too many people outside Quebec call la belle province as if to show off their bilingualism. In the past, Quebecers have talked about “pur laine” (pure wool) the term in French for those who are descended from the original settlers from New France. This group is seen as the ultimate Quebcois although...

Potpourri

Have you noticed the increasing amount of Americanization that’s creeping into our language? For years, Canadians have spelled defence with a “c” unlike the Americans who spell it with an “s” as in defense. Even as I write, my iMac underlines that word in red to let me know that I have made a mistake. But lately I see defense in Canadian newspapers all the time. When Ontario recently mailed me a notice about how I could renew my driver’s licence online, the form used both “licence” and “license” on the same one-page advisory. Obviously some bureaucrat was careful to...

Apologies

Some subscribers to my blog today received a blog post that you will have already read in February about the ouster of Erin O’Toole as leader of the Conservative Party. Gremlins in the works! If you’d like to read what you were supposed to receive, please go to rodmcqueen.com and you’ll find a post on the much more interesting topic of Elvis the Pelvis.