Rod McQueen's Blog, page 23

Retail retrogression

The Runnymede Theatre started life in 1927 offering vaudeville in a 1,400-seat auditorium and then adopted various guises that reflected the changing times: a bingo hall, movies in a twin-screen format, a Chapters bookstore, and now – ta-da – a Shoppers Drug Mart.

The latest incarnation of this West Toronto location is an ignominious pratfall from what once was known as “Canada’s Theatre Beautiful.” Oh, the walls and mouldings have been restored, but the entire ground floor is foodstuffs and beauty products with at least 100 running feet of freezers, soft drinks and cold-food displays. There’s countless kinds of chocolates, canned fish galore, and cereal for every taste (or lack thereof).

But nowhere is there a tube of toothpaste, first aid item or headache pill to be found. Up the escalator to the second floor and finally the prescription counter hoves into view almost hidden amid more seasonal flotsam and jetsam. Is Shoppers trying to become Walmart? And to think that we were always told food had such thin margins. If profits are so slim, why is Shoppers avidly promoting packaged goods?

Such copycat merchandising is everywhere. The Cineplex VIP auditoriums now sell beer, wine, and dinner delivered to your $25 seat so you can smell poutine being eaten beside you just as if you were watching A Star is Born at The Keg. Every burger and donut franchise is offering all-day-breakfast; as a result none of them varies much from the other. At this rate, soon you won’t need to spend much time shopping around. All your needs will be under one roof and every place will look – and smell – the very same. We’ve gone all the way back to the days of the general store. Hope there’s a cracker barrel and a few chairs to reflect on what’s been lost.

Donald J. Matthews 1926-2018

If ever there were a man in love with life and country, it was Don Matthews: entrepreneur, president of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada, and one of the very few who took on Ottawa and won. If he were in a room down the hall you could always hear his “har-har-har” laugh. If you were in that room, trying to avoid some contentious issue – and there were a few such issues in the PC Party – Matthews would declare: “Let’s put the codfish on the table and see how it smells.”

Matthews signed up for the Air Force at seventeen but by the time he was ready to fly Lancasters in bombing raids over Germany, the Second World War was over. He obtained his engineering degree from Queen’s on a vets program and launched his own construction firm in 1953 after rounding up $25,000 from friends and family. Forty years later, he headed an international giant with $500 million in revenue.

Throughout his business career, politics beckoned. He twice ran unsuccessfully for Parliament. He became president of the PC Party but the higher-ups couldn’t abide his forthright manner. When his term came up for renewal, the elites ran one of their own against him. Supporters of Matthews at the convention wore yellow construction hats. Ontario Premier Bill Davis walked the halls of Ottawa’s Chateau Laurier, telling any Matthews backer he saw, “No one important in the province of Ontario is wearing one of those.” Matthews lost, but only by sixteen votes, 635-619.

Matthews had enemies among Liberals, too. A consortium Matthews created won the contract to renew and expand two terminals at Toronto’s Pearson airport. After Jean Chrétien was elected prime minister in 1993, the deal was cancelled. His bankers promptly put Matthews’s companies into receivership. Matthews fought back through the courts and a Senate hearing. In 1997 the government agreed to pay $60 million in damages and legals divided among the members of the consortium. Matthews had won, but at 71, he was never able to rebuild anything near his previous net worth.

His spirit, however, remained undiminished. I visited him last year at the Sunnybrook Veterans Hospital during the Conservative leadership race. I said if he were still active, he’d have formed a group to back a candidate. “Who would be in the group?” he asked. I rattled off some names and we moved on to other topics. As the visit ended, he asked for my business card. Odd, I thought, given we’d been friends for forty-five years. “This is a contract,” he said. “For what?” I asked. “To put my group together,” said Matthews, irrepressible activist to the end.

 

The fourth estate as third world

After spending five years in politics, I wanted to get back into journalism, but no one would have me. I was seen as potentially too partisan. I might taint my stories with party propaganda. So I joined the Bank of Nova Scotia as director of public affairs. After two years, I was dry-cleaned and became business editor at Maclean’s just as the newsmagazine was going weekly in 1978. Ottawa had passed Bill C-58 which meant that the cost of advertising in the Canadian edition of Time was no longer tax deductible.

Suddenly, that ad revenue became available for Canadian publications, thereby making possible more journalism jobs in Canada and more Canadian content. I was among twenty new employees added at Maclean’s, bringing the editorial staff to seventy. According to Editor Peter C. Newman, because of the increased frequency, annual distribution of subscribers’ copies jumped from nine million when he’d arrived to thirty-three million when the magazine went weekly. That step by the federal government did not cost the Canadian taxpayer anything.

Today, the state of print journalism is parlous: layoffs and buyouts seem to occur daily. The current government’s answer is not as imaginative as in the past nor does it come as cheap. Instead, Ottawa wants to set up a $595 million fund to hire journalists for the same outfits that pay executive bonuses while populating newsrooms with interns. Or sell dozens of local papers to each other and immediately close some of their new holdings. Such behaviour does not deserve special treatment,

There is more merit in the novel approach being taken by La Presse and the Globe and Mail where deep-pocket owners have established charitable foundations so tax-deductible donations from the general public can help pay reporters’ salaries. At the Globe, the Thomson family has recently invested $20 million in a newsroom that must rank with the best equipped (and offer the best views) of any in the world. As for the government slushfund, no thank you. Is the free press really free if millions of dollars in aid flows from the very government about which it writes?

When right is wrong

After two years in office, what do we know about Donald Trump? We know he cheats on his wife. We know he cheats at golf. We know he tells lies at a prodigious rate. We know he’s a bully, a narcissist, and a demagogue. We know he supports and prefers other demagogues in Russia, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia, all of whom think nothing of killing their own people.

We know Trump’s impossible to work for as cabinet members and White House staffers get dumped almost daily. To date there has been no retribution for any of this. Yes, Trump lost the House in the midterms, but so did Bush II and Clinton, and still they recovered and were reelected at the next opportunity. So we can’t expect the mid-terms to be predictive of failure and the end of Trump.

Recently we were in New York and talked to a denizen of that city where there is a majority of Democrats. When she learned we were from Canada, she said, “I hear you’re building a wall.” That way, she opined, the toxin that is Trump would not flow north. At another recent occasion, someone declared the evening was “a Trump-free zone.” I think everyone was relieved we wouldn’t be discussing that day’s idiocies emanating from Washington, D.C.

The rightward tilt in the world today has been a long time coming. In the early 1980s, everyone with a profile was a small-l liberal. Barbara Amiel, who wrote a column in Maclean’s, was just about the only right-winger in the land. Now, it’s hard to find anyone in the media who’s on the left, the pendulum has swung so far. Waiting for it to swing back could take a long, long while. Meanwhile, hubris, that failing identified by the Bible as the pride that goeth before a fall, is our only hope. I can’t wait for that to play out.

War and peace

On this one hundredth anniversary of the end of the First World War, the signs are everywhere that while the people might remember the horrors and heroics of the past, some leaders seem to be forgetting. How else to explain the actions of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan who is fighting the Kurds, Russian President Vladimir Putin who overran Crimea and portions of Ukraine, and U.S. President Donald Trump who is at war with everyone. In Paris this weekend, only French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel showed any sign of good grace. Their meeting – in the same rail car used to sign the documents that ended the First World War as well as the fall of France during the Second World War – was more than just symbolic.

As a proud son of Scotland, my ancestors fought a few times against their English rulers. Every time the Scots rose up, the result was always the same. The clans could not remain united, the Scottish rebels eventually lost, and remained under England’s heel. The most recent film to attest to those repetitive uprisings is Outlaw King. The movie, which has just begun streaming on Netflix, tells of Robert the Bruce who followed William Wallace whose story was told in Braveheart.

At least the players in Outlaw King did not wear the kilt, as they did in Braveheart, a form of dress not used until several centuries later. But Mel Gibson’s speech to his men was better by far than Chris Pine’s in Outlaw King. Where Pine spoke of fighting for whatever reason, Gibson waxed about how the English “may take our lives but they’ll never take our freedom.”

Still, after the Scots played out their last rebellion under Bonnie Prince Charlie, they did lose their freedom. That’s why war will always be with us. There will forever be someone who is power hungry, vengeful, or seeking to eliminate some minority in their midst. So, while we might remember the past, we must also be ready for the future.

Johnny we hardly knew ye

For decades, Sir John A. Macdonald, our founding prime minister, was revered. He’d cobbled together a national government of diverse interests and peoples, built a transcontinental railway and had an uproarious character that involved a tad too much to drink. Today he is vilified, his own words flung back in his face.

What happened? Why, the politically correct found him wanting. In 1883, he said in the House of Commons that native children should be taken from their savage parents and taught white ways. At the time, few held different beliefs. Looking back, it’s easy to point a finger and preen. Yet the first thing historians will tell you is not to force modern-day values on matters of the past.

Imagine even fifty years from now when the people of that time, facing rising sea waters and no birds left alive to sing, ask, “Why couldn’t Donald Trump or Doug Ford see that climate change would end up this way? Why didn’t they do something?” Because they thought they were right and enough short-sighted people agreed. Meanwhile, the City of Victoria has removed Macdonald’s statue from the city hall steps. At Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., a bench bearing Sir John’s name and a portrait have already been whisked away. His name may also be coming off the faculty of law building.

The irony couldn’t be more obvious. The very names Victoria and Queen’s reek of colonialism and conquest. Will either follow their action against Sir John with name changes for themselves? I somehow doubt it. It’s so much easier to criticize another than see the complicity of your own situation. Meanwhile, a bust of Sir John sits on the desk where I write. I’m waiting for the purity police to come knocking on my door.

The Hon. Donald S. Macdonald 1932-2018

To understand Donald Stovel Macdonald, who died yesterday, you have to know that he was born and raised in Ottawa amidst great players on the national and international stage. In December 1941, at the age of nine, he walked by himself to Parliament Hill, just to get a glimpse of Winston Churchill being bundled into Centre Block to deliver his “some chicken, some neck” speech. Among the congregation at the church his family attended were two cabinet ministers in the Mackenzie King government, James Lorimer Ilsley and James Layton Ralston. His Sunday School teacher was John Read who later became the only Canadian ever appointed to the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

His father, also called Donald, was Dominion Forester, and responsible for launching reforestation in Canada. He’d take his young son on field trips to see projects and meet premiers. After graduating from the University of Toronto, Harvard, Cambridge, and Osgoode Hall, Macdonald practiced law in Toronto and joined the Liberal Party in the riding of Rosedale. He ran for Member of Parliament in 1962 because no one else would. Everyone thought the incumbent Progressive Conservative MP was a shoo-in. Macdonald won by 594 votes out of 23,806 cast. In the next election, he won by more than 6,000 votes. In all, he was re-elected five times.

As the first MP outside Québec to back Pierre Trudeau for Liberal leader in 1968, the two men became close. Every time Trudeau had a tough job, he’d turn to Macdonald. As House Leader Macdonald put through rules still in place today; in Defence he was unflappable during the FLQ crisis; in Energy he negotiated made-in-Canada oil pricing with Alberta; and in Finance he brought in wage and price controls.

Macdonald’s contributions continued after resigning from politics in 1978. In 1985, the Royal Commission he chaired recommended free trade with the United States, a policy embraced by Progressive Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. As High Commissioner to Britain from 1988-1991 Macdonald left his mark there, too, with a monument to Canada’s fallen forces erected across the road from Buckingham Palace. Macdonald was blessed with two bright and beautiful wives, Ruth and Adrian. After marrying Adrian in 1988, he was a beloved father and stepfather to a blended family of eleven children, one of whom was killed in a car accident in 1991.

It was my honour to work twice with Macdonald. In 1985, I wrote Leap of Faith at his request, a slimmed-down version of the two-million-word Royal Commission report that he knew no one would read in full. And, second, I helped with his memoirs, entitled Thumper, published in 2014. And let’s get the origin of that nickname straight. It wasn’t just his size thirteen shoes. The nickname was given to him by a U of T fraternity brother who said that the combination of Macdonald’s toothy grin and big feet reminded him of Thumper, the rabbit that kept thumping his left foot in Bambi, the animated Disney film. A finer man I never knew.

 

Exit stage left

When Justin Trudeau first announced the legalization of cannibis, I thought it was a good idea. Now that the day has almost arrived, I am not so sure. In particular, I have my doubts that legit pot will in any measurable way impinge upon black market sales. Such transactions will still occur after the legit stores are closed. Backstreet dealers might even offer credit for a day or two, another factor that differs from the official pot places.

But that’s not my only problem with Trudeau. The USMC has been a bit of a snow job. Trudeau made much of retaining Chapter Nineteen for dispute resolution when that device has hardly been used under NAFTA. And why exactly do we need to go to such lengths to protect dairy farmers, anyway? For the sake of a handful of ridings in Quebec?

Foreign relations are at a low ebb, too. Provoking Saudi Arabia with a tweet about human rights was foolish. You talk about such matters diplomatically, not through social media. The Saudis have relented on some of their demands for hundreds of students to return home, but the disruption in peoples’ live has been horrific for no obvious gain. And our armoured vehicles are still being used for nefarious purposes in Yemen.

Moreover, for a former drama teacher, Trudeau doesn’t have anything like a smooth speaking manner. He often interrupts himself several times with “ahs” in the midst of a single sentence. And what about that annoying breathlessness? Hasn’t anyone reminded him to fill up his diaphragm for the best sound? I could go on, but I think Justin Trudeau is beatable in the next election, an outcome that seemed well nigh impossible when he won a majority three years ago this month.

Gender-bending Shakespeare

Faithful readers may remember my praise for Martha Henry’s performance this season at Stratford as Prospero in “The Tempest.” Imagine my pleasure to see her interviewed Monday night at McMaster University along with Seana McKenna. The two actors appeared as part of The Socrates Project, a series of cultural events running until next summer, sponsored by L. R. “Red” Wilson, a businessman and former McMaster chancellor.

The two women were interviewed by CBC’s Eleanor Wachtel. McKenna talked the most, but Henry was the best. In response to a question about how she got into acting, Henry told of owning a dress that made her look like a fairy when she was seven. Henry heard that the Brownies were planning to put on a play, so she joined and got the part. She had no interest in campfires, badges or knots, just performing.

The second reason was even more revealing. Henry’s parents had divorced, but she didn’t know that, and was sent to live with her grandmother. There, in a trunk, she found two plays and enjoyed taking one part and then the other. More important than be being able to choose either character, Henry said that the world of plays meant she knew how things turned out, something that real life did not allow.

The evening was mostly about women playing men in Shakespeare. McKenna, who was Julius Caesar this year at Stratford, cited Lear’s famous diatribe about how the gods should prevent daughter Goneril from ever having children. Imagine, said McKenna, the even greater power of that same speech if given by a female Lear as mother to daughter. But of all the sights and sounds on stage at McMaster, the most memorable was the beatific face of Martha Henry who, at eighty, looks like she has found inner peace. Nobody had to write that role for her.

Music of the spheres

A sentence on the front page of my morning paper caught my eye. The story was about the meeting between South Korean President Moon Jae-in with North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un who greeted his visitor while “a brass band played the North Korean leader’s personal arrival song.” Arrival song? Has diplomacy taken on the patina of Major League Baseball where a batter gets to choose the stadium music played as he walks to the plate? For example, Justin Smoak of the Blue Jays takes his practice swings to the sound of Brantley Gilbert’s “The Weekend.”

Maybe Kim’s arrival song is simply the modern-day inheritor of campaign music that had its beginnings with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “Happy Days Are Here Again.” To my mind, the best political campaign song, certainly the most ironic, was John McCain’s 2008 pick of Abba’s “Take A Chance On Me” when he sought the presidency with the inimitable Sarah Palin as his running mate.

To that end, I’ve come up with a few selections of my own, trying to match the right music with the right person in the public eye. During the NAFTA talks, Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland should face the press scrum while playing Tom Petty and the Heartbreaker’s “I Won’t Back Down.” Donald Trump conjures up many possibilities such as “I’m So Groovy” by Future, but my favourite is “Bad Boy for Life” by Puff Daddy.

From history, Charles de Gaulle’s theme song could be Edith Piaf’s soul-searching, “Non, je ne regrette rien.” As for Maxime Bernier, leader of the freshly launched People’s Party of Canada, his best call to arms is Paul Anka’s “Lonely Boy.” For Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer, “Under Pressure,” by Queen. And for Justin Trudeau, who is no longer what he seemed, what else but Eric Church’s “Lotta Boot Left to Fill.”