Rod McQueen's Blog, page 25

The ears have it

I was riding in a car recently with a young driver who might have been in his early 20s. Rap was playing. He asked, “Do you like this music?” “No,” I said, “they finally invented a music I don’t like.” He quickly switched to Sirius channels from the 70s and 80s featuring songs from artists like Bob Seger and Gary Wright. I was a happy man, transported into the past via streaming music.

If such technology doesn’t appeal, you’ll be interested to know that there is likely a group of ancient rockers playing a concert in a venue near you. Among the multiple touring bands this year is half of The Monkees – Mickey Dolenz and Mike Nesmith. The latter used to be a recluse until he found out how remunerative these gigs are. Davy Jones is dead. Peter Tork says he’s had enough gadding about for a while.

If The Monkees are not your thing, how about Phil Collins in his “Not Dead Yet, Live!” tour or Nana Mouskouri in her “Forever Young” tour? She’s 83. Fleetwood Mac and Def Leppard are also out there somewhere. Elton John’s currently on his five continent “Farewell Yellow Brick Road” tour which could last two years or until his wardrobe runs out, whichever comes first. And of course, there’s Billy Joel who plays Madison Square Garden every few months and has now had fifty consecutive sellout shows.

Why do audiences fill halls to hear these hits from the blitz? Well, we saw Chicago and the Allman Brothers Band last summer. While they look older on stage than you might like, inside you feel as young as you were when you first heard them. And that alone is worth the price of admission.

Happy warriors

When I recently learned that Centre Block on Parliament Hill was closing for ten years of renovation, I knew I had to take a nostalgia tour. Ten years could mean fifteen, or even twenty. If it took that long, I’d be in my nineties and might not be around for the outcome. I wanted to discover what was the same and what had changed since I worked on the Hill in the 1970s.

Because I’d been press secretary for the Leader of the Opposition, I first wanted to look at Room 409-S. So I wrote to the current occupant, the Honourable Andrew Scheer, and received a speedy and positive response from one of his staffers, Kelsey Regnier. She made the necessary arrangements and last Friday we were able to see that my former office has been added to an expanded meeting room with “Fear God” and “Honour the King” still carved above the doors. Scheer was in Montreal but we enjoyed a special tour of Centre Block given by John Brassard, the member for Barrie-Innisfil, and deputy opposition whip. A former firefighter, he is an ebullient man who cares deeply for his country.

Some surprises: There’s airport-style security at the main door and additional security if you want to sit in the visitors’ gallery. You can’t even wear your watch; it could become a projectile! John Diefenbaker’s office is now occupied by opposition staffers drumming up questions for Question Period. Between the official portraits of Paul Martin and Jean Chretien stands a pillar, as if commemorating the rivalry between the two former Liberal prime ministers. My favourite room in all the world, the Parliamentary Library, is as magnificent as ever.

The most enjoyable aspect was meeting so many MPs, who when they heard I’d worked for Robert Stanfield, cited the fabled comment by Richard Gwyn of the Toronto Star who called Stanfield, “The best prime minister we never had.” Stanfield would rather have become PM, but losing didn’t make him either bitter or morose. Still, it was a pleasure to hear such praise forty years after he walked those halls. Few men make that kind of mark in this world.

Choiceless choices

A couple of years ago, when I got sick of the trouble Bell was having updating its Internet server, I fled to Rogers. The young man who signed me up assured me that Rogers had its own server and was constantly updating it. Of course, he was lying. Once aboard I could see that Rogers did not have its own server, they used Yahoo. I should have known one telecom was no better than another.

My service has been OK, just the usual blips and hiccups, until a few days ago. Those of you with Rogers will have seen the pop-up declaring that Yahoo and AOL had joined to create Oath, a part of Verizon. And, oh by the way, they would be looking at any and all content I send and receive with a view to learning what I was saying and to whom. If I didn’t agree to their terms of use after some time had passed, they would simply assume I had agreed and continue their eavesdropping at will, so I might as well accept now.

Elsewhere I found a line saying if I wanted to know what private information Rogers already had on me, I could send a message to a specific email address. I got an emailed response and phone number from someone with the unlikely title of Advisor, Office of the President. I phoned and asked if he worked for a president of one of the divisions, but he was evasive. The background noise sounded a lot like a call centre. Maybe title inflation has reached the lower ranks. Turns out what they knew about me was stuff like when I’d made an appointment for a service call. Nothing about my real life as a brigand.

We made an appointment for him to call again this week when he said he would “guide me through” the process to “opt out” and gain more privacy. I was excited to think I was on the way to winning the war with the nosy American behemoths. But, when he called today, he had me go to a site and click on one thing and that was the extent of it. I can’t imagine those few seconds changed much. He said he’d just learned that morning about what he’d showed me and added that he’d get in touch when he knew more. I expect he’ll be President by then and have one of his advisors make the call. Meanwhile, I’m under Oath.

Eternal sunshine of the thoughtless mind

Am I the only one who thinks Drake was showboating the other night when he wore that Humboldt Broncos hoodie to the Raptors-Wizards basketball game? You know Drake, don’t you, the Toronto boy who became famous as a rapper, the first music invented in my lifetime that I don’t like. But there he was, to the cheers of 20,000 fans, paying his respects to the sixteen hockey players and staff killed in a collision with a transport truck.

These days, lots of people are wearing hockey jerseys as a tribute to the team. I was in the underground Path one day last week and many passers-by wore just such gear. But there’s a difference. Each of them went to their closet that morning and picked out a favourite. There was a preponderance of Leafs jerseys, but many other NHL teams were represented, too. I also saw a Sidney Crosby Team Canada shirt, a vintage Wayne Gretzky, and one from the Oshawa Generals.

In contrast, Drake had his made special. Maybe it wasn’t even his idea; maybe someone in his entourage organized the whole thing and laid it out for him at game time. Kind of a bespoke without speaking. How much of Drake actually went into the outfit may be minimal, except for the payment. I can’t imagine what it cost. $500? More?

What else can you expect from a so-called Raptors fan like Drake who has at best been an on-again off-again supporter this season? And someone who recently attended a private party at his newest Toronto restaurant for the visiting team, Raptors’ nemesis LeBron James and his Cleveland Cavaliers. Wonder what colours Drake wore that night?

The fifty-first state

I was writing a postal code, got to the Z, and said to myself “Zee” … not “Zed.” Has it come to this? Have I finally been totally Americanized? Little wonder, when you consider the inundations that daily roll into our country from across the southern border. Or as Derek Burney, the former Canadian ambassador to the U.S., used to call it, “The world’s longest undefended cliché.”

Look at retail. U.S. banners from Amazon to Walmart dominate the Canadian shopping landscape. Eaton’s is long gone. The Bay seems to have been taken over by Saks Fifth Avenue, not vice versa. And there’s a Nordstrom Rack opening in May only five minutes from where I live. If only the depth of stock and quality of service came with the names. Nordstrom has been in Canada for more than a year and they still don’t carry Smartcare, their most popular line of men’s dress shirts.

Even our language is morphing more American. The first time I heard anyone use “buddy” for everyone he met was my friend from Georgia when I lived in Washington, D.C. in the 1990s. Now you can’t escape it. Everybody calls everybody buddy; everybody’s son is called buddy. It’s like no-one gets christened anymore. And, in the movies, Toronto is still Hollywood’s most photographed city that dares not speak its name. We can be any American urban centre we are so successful at hiding our real selves.

The only saving grace in all of this is that Donald Trump is not our president. But I say, let’s retake out identity. Build a wall. Unlike Mexico, we should happily pay for it.

 

Black and white and gone all over

Pardon me for writing about newspapers two weeks in a row, but this is too much. In the Globe and Mail today, there’s a story about a man who has quit using toilet paper. Instead, he takes a short shower after every ablution and urges the rest of us to do the same in order to save trees, electricity and the free world. In yesterday’s New York Times, there was a piece about a man who’s gone cashless. So far, in 2018, he says he has managed to touch hardly any paper money or metal coins. When I went on cbc.ca on the weekend, the top five stories were all soft stuff starting with the craziest April Fool’s yarns ever.

Whatever happened to the news? Where do I go to find it? Nowadays, you can’t find a news story to wipe your you-know-what with. Maybe I’m part of the problem. I used to read Time, Newsweek and Maclean’s religiously every week. Now I read none of them in a month of Sundays. A while back, when the late and unlamented Newsweek was resurrected, I didn’t even bother to pick up a copy to see if they still knew what they were doing, or if George Will had his old column back again. Or was that in Time?

Newspapers in Canada have never been as readable as the British press. During the first few weeks I lived in Britain in the 1980s, I’d go to the news agent first thing every morning, buy several papers, and spend hours wallowing in wonderful reads that even included obituaries of people I’d never heard of because every word was like a polished gem strung on a beautiful necklace. After a while, I limited my purchase to one quality paper and one tabloid just so’s I’d have time for other duties during the day.

I hereby swear an oath. I’ll keep looking for the news, and if I find it, I’ll pay for it. Meanwhile, I’ll just do what everybody else is doing, read for free and get exactly what I paid for. Complaining all the while.

 

 

 

Trading places

Once upon a time, long ago, there was a country where factories hummed, pipelines gurgled, and newspapers flourished. Yes, my son, newspapers flourished, it was that long ago. But then something called the Internet arrived. Everyone wanted to play Candy Crush and take selfies. No one wanted to read exclusives anymore. Why not just look at an aggregator that steals stories from hither and from yon?

Poster Boy and Thor Moon were two among the downtrodden in the business despite having dozens of different outlets. Trouble was, most titles were doing poorly. Readership, ads, everything had gone blooey. So Poster Boy and Thor Moon came up with a brilliant idea. Why doesn’t each of us give some of our longest-suffering to the other? Maybe a competitor can do what we can’t and bring back readers by the throng.

So each designated a few cities they were prepared to cede and traded them to the other guy. Once each had their competitor’s castoffs, they looked at the books and said, “Booga, booga, these are worse than the ones we gave away. Let’s close them down. We’ve got neither history nor heartstrings attached.” And so it was that many communities across the land suddenly had fewer choices than before, a couple of hundred souls lost their jobs and no one seemed to care.

Except for the Competence Bureau, who decided to look into the deal because, well, it seemed odd, given how they both did the same thing with some of the other guy’s giveaways. But the Competence Bureau was stuck; all they had was Poster Boy and Thor Moon saying there was no grand plan. And why shouldn’t they be believed? After all, they’re in the news business, aren’t they? They must know fake from fact.

Sheltered from the storms

In a world where most countries are clamping down on migrants or kicking foreigners out, I’m happy to live in Canada, a land that takes all comers. Economically, there are good reasons; we get workers who pay into the Canada Pension Plan so it doesn’t go bust. Morally, there are better reasons; who are we to keep anyone out? We’re all immigrants here. My father came with his family when he was three. On my mother’s side, I’m fifth generation Canadian.

These days, Toronto is certainly changed from the burg I visited as a boy to see my grandparents. Today, more than half the people who live in Toronto were born in another country. Sometimes, when I’m riding the subway, I’m the only white guy on the car.

You only have to read the names of the 2018 graduates of the Chartered Professional Accountants program to get a sense of what’s happening. Traditional British names are in short supply. On four newspaper pages of grads there are two Russells, two Reeds, two Jones, nine Smiths, and four Murphys. But there are fourteen Patels, twenty-one Lees, ten Khans, twenty-two Wangs and thirty-three Zhangs.

And the next generation fits right in. I recently watched five teenaged girls in hijabs who could have been any race, creed, or colour as they laughed, joshed with boys, and generally misbehaved. I only hope none of these recent arrivals follow the habits of one purebred Canadian family I saw at breakfast in a restaurant last week. A father was with his three bairns, the oldest was maybe seven, the next was four, and there was a baby old enough to sit up and feed herself. All the kids were watching tablets, two with headsets. No one talked to anyone. Let’s hope our immigrants don’t fit in that well. Better to hear their hopes and dreams than just see the tops of their heads.

Constant craving

Now that all legal challenges have been abandoned, Doug Ford is officially leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario. I can’t think of a worse outcome. When his brother Rob was mayor of Toronto, Doug was supposedly the brains of the pair, which wasn’t saying much. To my mind, Doug Ford doesn’t deserve to be leader. Should someone be allowed to become leader when previously he wasn’t even running to be a member of the legislature?

Still, the election of Ford puts Ontario in lockstep with other jurisdictions where populism triumphs over ideas and ideals. That’s what’s sweeping the western world when you look at Poland, Hungary, Italy (when a coalition is created), Brexit in the United Kingdom and Donald Trump in the United States. Grass roots voters are choosing social conservatives whose only thought for the future is that the past has all been a mistake.

I can’t vote for a party with Doug Ford as leader. He’s too much of a yahoo for me. Nor can I vote for a party led by Kathleen Wynne who thinks my grandchildren should pay my electric bill. But I can’t stay home on election day, June 7; I’ve always voted in any and all elections. Intentionally spoiling a ballot is just buffoonery. I’m left with but one choice: a protest vote for the NDP.

And I’m OK with that. In fact, I voted NDP once before. Of course, at the time I was young and ornery. Now I’m older, but still ornery. I’ve always preferred politicians with a little class. It’s a trait that’s increasingly in short supply.

 

 

The sun has set

John McNeil was one of the very few senior Canadian business executives with a world view. During the last few decades of the twentieth century, most of our big-league CEOs were born in small-town Canada. They’d find their way to Vancouver, Toronto, or Montreal, and then slog their way to the top. Not McNeil, who died February 26, at eighty-four. The former chairman and CEO of the Sun Life Assurance Co. of Canada had grown up and lived in England, Africa and Scotland before emigrating to Canada.

For McNeil, that broadband heritage was both a strength and a weakness. Because he was so strong-willed, McNeil soon ran afoul of an early boss, Bank of Montreal Chairman and CEO Bill Mulholland. After the two clashed publicly, the division where McNeil worked just happened to be reorganized and he was out of a job. When I interviewed McNeil about his departure from BMO, he was almost wistful. “I believe a cat can look at the king, and that ….” When his voice trailed away, I finished the sentence, “… says it all.” McNeil nodded and whispered, “Maybe.”

When my book about bankers, The Moneyspinners, was published in 1983 I included our conversation and the lead-up to his leave-taking. McNeil was spitting mad I’d quoted him and did not speak to me for years. For my 1996 book, Who Killed Confederation Life?, I needed to know how willingly the insurance industry had tried to save Confed, one of its own. Half a dozen competitors had met numerous times but no deal was struck nor buyer found. When the regulators seized Confed, the other CEOs were too embarrassed to talk about their ineffectual efforts.

McNeil, who participated in all the meetings, was my last hope. I feared he’d still hold a grudge but I put in an interview request anyway. To my great surprise, he agreed, and arrived at the designated meeting room carrying a stack of journals in which he’d made contemporaneous notes about who said what to whom over a period of many months. That book, which won the National Business Book Award, owes much to McNeil’s notes and his willingness to forgive my sin of commission. McNeil will forever be remembered as a man who always spoke truth, a rarity in any era.