Rod McQueen's Blog, page 17

Fredrik S. Eaton 1938-2021

About eighteen months ago I was early for lunch with a member at one of Toronto’s finest clubs. I was guided to a sitting area to wait for my host. As I began to take a seat, I realized Fred Eaton was a couple of chairs away, waiting for his lunch companion. I had not seen Fred since my book on the demise of the family department store some twenty years ago.
“I’m Rod McQueen,” I said. “I know who you are,” he harrumphed. I sat down nearby anyway and for the next five-to-eight minutes we had a conversation that got warmer as time passed about a number of topics including the success of our respective sons. Fred had given me a lengthy interview for my book, but when it came out, he was quoted in the Toronto Star saying that he planned “to form a committee to horsewhip me.”
Fred did well when he ran Eaton’s in the 1980s as a result of a strong economy and an extraordinary executive officer named Greg Purchase. In 1991, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney named Fred as Canadian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom. He took up his post as only an Eaton could by bringing along a Rolls-Royce for town use and a yacht for holiday-making.
While he was abroad, younger brother George ran the shop until they declared bankruptcy. In a privately published memoir that came out recently, Fred wrote mostly about sailing and hunting but he did talk about retailing. He blamed George for the sad, final turn of events. In fact, the thesis of my book had been that Eaton’s was on a downward slide since the 1930s. As one who conducted extensive research on the family, I can say that Fred lived an estimable life. In addition to representing Canada with distinction, he was a philanthropist of note, lending his name and his fortune to many causes, particularly health care and the arts.
As for our relationship, I don’t say he forgave me or forgot the stories in my book. But our conversation that day showed he was a good and gracious man. Even when there was no need to be.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Shout it out

Do you find yourself shouting at the television these days because your Covid-19 fatigue has reached new heights? We do. A favourite target for our ire is Justin Trudeau who regularly assures us that the vaccine program is “on track.” At one press briefing he must have used the phrase half a dozen times. All of which is punctuated by his quick intakes of breath, an unlikely but annoying leftover from his days as a drama teacher. In fact, the only Canadians I know who have received shots are both in their 90s and live in retirement homes. They deserve the early help; some of us might get a jab by June. Some “on”, some “track.”
Chrystia Freeland is another irritator who has taken on airs. Have you seen her media interviews, conducted in what appears to be a specially created stage set complete with desk and backdrop? She wears a wide smile, demonstrates unnecessarily with her hands, speaks in what can only be described as a simpering tone and repeats the journalist’s name several times. The overall effect is unctuous, to say the least.
TV ads for products and services are little better. The slip-and-fall lawyers are particularly galling as are burger outlets with takeout offerings stacked so high with jalapenos that you’d need a firehose to actually eat one. And what about all those new drugs with spiffy names that are plugged on the evening news reports of the American networks? The accompanying camera work showing footage of families at play is meant to take your mind off the announcer’s palaver about multiple possible side effects. The upshot is that it would seem no one could possibly live through a month’s prescription usage without contracting some fatal condition.
In Sao Paulo, Brazil, an entrepreneur has opened a “rage room” where, for about C$6, you can enter, grab a hammer and then smash old computers and printers until your stress about Covid has been safely assuaged. In Canada, maybe there could be a hockey room where you take slap shots at a fake goalie or throw ready-made snowballs at leering faces pasted to the walls. Me, I don’t need any such outlet. I’ve got my television to shout at.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Where were my eyes yesterday?

It’s coming up on a year since the pandemic began and, oh, how our lives have changed. No theatre, no art galleries, too few times with family. You’re left with asking people what they’re recommending among Netflix offerings. The Dig, with Carey Mulligan and Ralph Fiennes tops my list. As for Ozark, after sitting through too many bizarre plot twists and grisly incidents, we abandoned the series early in the second season.
But there’s a whole other world out there, one that’s always been around, we just haven’t paid as much attention as we should. The moon is a prime example. I once drove at dusk to a parking lot near Lake Ontario to watch the rising of a so-called super moon. And from time to time paid attention to the crescent moon, just because it was such a sliver in the sky. Now, I’m always on the lookout for the next phase, or discovering the name of the full moon. Last month’s was the Wolf Moon, so I was told, named after wolves foraging for food.
Then there’s the sun. On Florida’s Gulf Coast, people gather every night on the beach to watch the disc of the sun sink slowly into the water. There always seemed to be someone playing the bagpipes. But that was just a holiday thing. These days I know the exact time of every sunrise and sunset and will position myself as often as possible to see both or either on any given day.
No one was sadder than I to miss the December 21 “great conjunction” of Saturn and Jupiter, the first since mediaeval times. For several days before and after the magic moment, it was always cloudy so I missed the reuniting. Other reunions of a sort occur when I call someone I haven’t talked to in months. I always come away feeling better. I hope they do, too.
As for walks, now I never miss a day. In the woods with moose prints in the snow. In a park past the statue of Edward VII. On semi-deserted streets in Toronto. I recently discovered the iPhone I’ve had for two years has an app that’s been counting my steps whether I cared or not. Now I care! I haven’t hit the 10,000 steps in a day sought by aficionados, but one day last week I reached 9,309. It’s like I’m in training for I know not what. So, yes, I’ve learned a lot about cases, lockdowns, variants and antibodies. But I’ve also learned a lot more about life and how to live it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The power gap

Robyn Doolittle, along with half a dozen colleagues at the Globe and Mail, has spent months investigating the status of women in the workplace. Usually, such studies just look at business, but this work not only covered public companies, but also universities, cities, cultural institutions, hospitals, police services, and not-for-profit organizations. What they found, published on Saturday, was that while pay was still a problem, “what really stood out was the overall lack of women. At entity after entity, women were dramatically outnumbered. In the higher bands of salaries, it wasn’t unusual to see five times more men.”
The problem wasn’t just at the top. “We noticed they also seemed to be underrepresented among vice-presidents, directors, managers and supervisors.” Their conclusion: “The wage gap was a problem, no question. But the term seemed inadequate in describing what we were seeing: This was a power gap.”
I have followed this issue closely for twenty-five years. In the 1990s, while at the Financial Post, I launched an annual feature called “The 50 Most Powerful Women” in order to honour and highlight those who’d made it to leadership roles as well as encourage other women to strive for similar heights. Progress since has been paltry. Society now needs to take drastic steps so that women, who comprise more than half the people in most organizations, get the future they deserve.
There already exists an organization that could assume a leadership role to at least alter the lacklustre approach by public companies: the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC). The OSC is currently undergoing a review by the Government of Ontario. Among the seventy recommendations made by the task force in its report released last Friday, publicly listed companies are exhorted to increase to 50 percent the number of female directors and executive managers within five years.
But there’s no declared punishment for slackers. In 2015, the OSC urged business to increase the numbers of women on boards and then describe in annual reports how they complied or, if not, explain why. Far too many firms neither complied nor explained. No penalties ensued. Let’s attach teeth to those targets recommended by the task force. Without goals and consequences, too many accomplished women will continue to remain mired in middle management.

The dogs of war

When I think back to my time as bureau chief in Washington, D.C., for the Financial Post, it feels so long ago compared to what is happening now it might well have been the Pleistocene Age when mammoths walked the earth. During my posting from 1989-1993, Washington was an idyllic spot troubled only by a few eccentricities. As Jack Kennedy quipped: “Washington is a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm.”
Pansies bloomed all winter when the worst that could happen was a forecast of an inch or two of snow. The federal government would promptly send everyone home. Residents would clean out their local Safeway in preparation for the Armageddon that never came. Spring arrived six weeks earlier than in Toronto; magnolia grandiflora presided over front lawns. Redbud lit up the rural roads.
To be sure, there were problems in south-east D.C. where most of the Blacks lived while the privileged white folks inhabited tony Georgetown with its rows of federal-style red brick homes. But the people in charge and their places of work were held in high regard. Standing amid other journalists in the Oval Office was an honour. Hearings on Capitol Hill produced knowledgable witnesses and thoughtful outcomes.
Today’s Washington is unrecognizable. Donald Trump, the 45th president, has disgraced the office. Partisan politics dominates; Congressional compromises are rare. There are too few individuals fighting for a good cause. Networks and Internet sites have become raucus platforms for their narrow views. Perversely, the attack on Capitol Hill seemed aided and abetted by some guards who should have been repelling the mob.
Trump, who incited the murderous siege, doesn’t likely know much Shakespeare, but he would readily salute this call to arms from the playwright’s Julius Caesar, ”Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war.” Given the sorry state of affairs in Washington and elsewhere in the U.S,, those slavering dogs will be running amok for a long while yet.

Scribble, scribble

I just finished writing a book. It was a four-year-long project. You’d think I’d want to take some time off but you’d be wrong. When you’ve been writing pretty much every day since Grade Twelve, you get twitchy when you’re not typing away at something. The whole thing started with a weekly high school news column in my hometown paper, the Guelph Mercury. I was paid nine cents a column inch. It was due Monday morning so I’d sit down at 9 p.m. on a Sunday night and write until I fell asleep. My forty inches of copy earned $3.60, enough to take my then girlfriend to the movies on Friday night and for chips with gravy and cherry Cokes after. What’s not to like about this, I thought.

Since then I have written countless newspaper features, opinion columns, magazine profiles and executive speeches, but mostly books, twenty of them, all non-fiction. I‘ve tried fiction but I’m terrible at it. It’s tough for a non-fiction writer to give himself permission to make things up. Books take a lot of work, up to 150 interviews, extensive archival digging, and the relentless habit of writing 500 words every day for eighteen months, then re-writing, editing and proofreading.

My books have generally sold well but not because of good reviews. Reviewers always say desultory things, as if they feel it’s their calling to find something wrong with everything they read. Moreover, bookstores seem to give your books poor display. Doug Gibson, who published my first book in 1983, advised me never to go into a bookstore looking for my book because I wouldn’t be able to find it. And if I did go in and couldn’t find it, don’t ask staff where it is, he said, because they will say that they’ve never heard of it.

Promotional tours involved ten-city cross-country trips with eight interviews a day in each city. No one conducting an interview had ever read the book. That was OK, you just took charge. But you’d be part way through a radio interview, getting ready to tell one of your better anecdotes, then think, “I know I’ve already told this story today, but have I told it during this interview?”

As you can see, there’s a lot to dislike about publishing a book. But as with most things in life, it’s about the journey, not the destination.

The ghosts of Christmas past

The earliest Christmas dinner celebrations I can remember occurred at my maternal grandparent’s home in the west end of Toronto. They just had a small bungalow but somehow my mother, father, me, my mother’s brother, his wife and their two children who were both younger than me, could all squeeze around the dining room table with our hosts.

In my mind, the turkey was the size of my elder cousin and carved with gusto, after much sharpening of the knife on a whetstone, by my grandfather. My grandmother always ate the roundish nub at the turkey’s rear, something she called the pope’s nose. The event took days of preparation and much scurrying to and fro in the kitchen by the ladies. Men were not allowed.

About ten days before Christmas there was always a party for employees where my father worked in Guelph. He was in charge of entertainment for the kids that consisted of a two-reeler including a feature film, numerous shorts, news items and cartoons. The movie canisters arrived by bus a week ahead so my father always previewed everything at home, an evening occasion when I got to invite half a dozen friends. In the days when television was still in its infancy, such an event was much prized.

In this year of the Covid Christmas, we will be having none of the usual family gatherings for roast beef on Christmas Eve followed by turkey and all the trimmings on Christmas Day. That’s why I’m revelling in such former youthful times as well as recalling Christmas dinners during various adult years spent in London, England, Paris, France, and Washington, D.C.

I imagine there will be many families suffering a similar drought this year. Cousins will not be flying in from some foreign land; in-laws won’t be driving from Ottawa to join the festivities. And that’s okay, too. For me, Christmas has always been as much about times past as times present. This year will be very different in that regard. And not just because there will be fewer gatherings, but because we not only have our fond memories but also the promise and the premise of a better future next year.

So, enjoy, however you’re celebrating. Good cheer at Christmas and good health in 2021.

Death and indifference

Have we all become inured to deaths caused by Covid-19? Every day the front page of our newspapers and the top of the broadcast news highlight the number of new cases and the mounting death toll. Odious comparisons are made with other jurisdictions; pundits talk about deaths per one hundred thousand; words such circuit-breaker and lockdown take on new meanings.

Obituaries cite Covid as the cause of death. But, the problem is that there is no means of grieving. Funeral services will be held at some future, unspecified, date. There’s havoc being wreaked in long-term care facilities where those who die in such woebegone places or hospital ICU units are not surrounded by loving family as in the past.

Moreover, many individuals have turned social distancing into full avoidance. We have become paranoid about someone coming toward us who is not wearing a mask. A sneeze or a cough let loose nearby sends us scuttling for safety. The paucity of concerts, movies, gallery outings and the like have turned us into hermits. For some, a barbecue restaurant doing business when it should have been closed, becomes a flashpoint for irate “freedom” fighters, one of whom spat at police

During all these shenanigans there is too little community-based activity and not enough thought for the plight of others. What is happening to our world? While no one wants to die, is this the sort of place anyone would want to live? What if we survive and the world is forever changed because caring has disappeared? Let us hope that, after the cure, kindness returns.

 

Make haste slowly

The just-released memoir by former Bank of Montreal CEO Tony Comper is an unusual achievement. To the best of my knowledge, no other Big Five Bank CEO in the modern era has published a memoir. In “Personal Account,” Comper writes that he didn’t want to follow the usual “when I was three” chronological rendition. Instead, he picked out twenty-five incidents in his business life that demonstrate qualities of leadership or character. Among them is his explanation how he went into banking rather than join the priesthood or become a professor teaching Chaucer.

With help from Calgary-based ghostwriter Bruce Dowbiggin, Comper also describes how he left the path to become a branch manager by accepting an appointment in computer systems even though he took a salary cut. The move paid off; at thirty-two in 1978 he was named a vice-president, the youngest ever in the bank’s history. There are also chapters explaining how he increased the number of female executives and one where he defends CEO compensation, although not too successfully.

(Full disclosure: after his wife Elizabeth died in 2014, LifeTales editor Eloise Lewis and I helped Comper publish Liz’s speeches about FAST, the organization she and Tony had established, Fighting Antisemitism Together.) Comper credits his success in banking to being what he calls a “catastrophizer,” someone who visualizes all the things that could possibly go wrong in a new project and tries to ensure that none of them happen. Another secret to is “to do the right thing” which is hardly novel but all-too-rarely practiced in the business world.

Comper’s philosophy during his forty-year career was “festina lente” translated as “make haste slowly.” It seemed to work. In retirement since 2007, he is a philanthropist, has a real estate portfolio, as well as curators overseeing his art collection and his rare book and first edition library. His goal in life has been to make a difference. With any luck, one of those differences will be to spur others in business to reveal all about their own lives.

Ups and downs

My morning paper delivers good news and bad. Today’s edition contained a legal notice under the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act (CCAA). CCAA is the last gasp of a firm that has become insolvent. Justice James Farley, who reigned from the insolvency bench and has now retired to arbitration work, delighted in pronouncing CCAA as “caw.” Farley had other jokes, too, that always made the lawyers who appeared before him laugh uproariously. He liked to hear their laughter; they hoped it would improve their cause.

The legal notice was for Sears Canada Inc. and was aimed at unsecured creditors, the last in line for money after the banks and other secured creditors get paid. I have not seen the list but I imagine it includes the likes of a plumber owed some amount such as $10,809.59. This notice has been amended from a previous proposal. Imagine the millions of dollars already billed by lawyers and accounting firms acting for clients trying to squeeze something from the Sears corpse.

Chicago-based Sears, Roebuck & Co. first approached Simpson’s in 1952 to propose joint ownership of the two companies’ catalogue and mail-order business. When the deal closed the following year, retailing in Canada was changed forever. Simpson’s agreed to be restricted to the urban centres where it already had stores. Sears could build anywhere as long as the new store was at least 25 miles away from a Simpson’s outlet. The first Simpson-Sears department store was in Hamilton, Ontario. Six more soon followed as Sears chased the market leader, Eaton’s.

By 1976, Eaton’s catalogue was gone. Such was the prowess of Sears that it eventually replaced the Eaton’s store in the mothership, the Eaton Centre. Then came its slow demise. In 2018 the last Sears store in Canada closed. In the Eaton Centre, Sears was replaced by another U.S. giant, Nordstrom. Who knows how long it will last. Even before Covid-19, shoppers were too few. As for Nordstrom Rack, any Canadian who has shopped in a Nordstrom Rack south of the border knows full well that we are getting only half the choice and one-third the quality. It took Sears sixty-five years for its rise and fall. My five cents says it won’t take Nordstrom anywhere near that long to close up shop and retreat back home. Canada has become a Wal-Mart nation. We can only hope that’s all we import.