Rod McQueen's Blog, page 4

Stayin’ alive

That was quite a spectacle this week when about 20 per cent of the 153-member Liberal caucus lunged at their leader and lost. Politically, Justin Trudeau, who is languishing in the national polls, had every reason to hang on. When a beleaguered Brian Mulroney stepped down in 1993, the resulting election was a debacle for his Progressive Conservative Party. Kim Campbell took over and managed to go from 154 seats to two seats in the next election.
There’s no reason to believe the Liberals would do any better in an election today. After all, Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives are ahead in the polls by about twenty percentage points. With the NDP nowhere, and the Liberals likely to lose badly, the Conservatives could win a resounding majority with more than 200 seats.
Of course, another Prime Minister Trudeau resigned then returned to win re-election once before. That was in 1979-80 when Pierre left and then came back. Maybe Justin is looking to go one better and just stay in place.
But the scene of Justin, facing a revolt within his own party, then carrying on as prime minister brings a new level of folly to what needs to be a smooth running machine in Ottawa. And how silly is it for the government to pretend everything is normal by announcing permitted levels of immigration for the next three years just as if they expect to be in charge for that entire period?
As if there weren’t enough bodies bumping about at the top, there’s also Mark Carney, former governor of two different central banks, the recently appointed chair of an economic advisory task force for the Liberals and the author of a new book on his ideas for Canada’s future. Why isn’t Trudeau worried about him?
I believe the real reason Trudeau is hanging on as leader is because he has nowhere else to go except stay at home and take turns with his ex-wife minding the kids. After all, he hasn’t had too many job offers of late. And that’s despite all his international travel as he dreams of an appointment to a prime spot someplace like the United Nations, the Organization of American States or the World Trade Organization. Please, someone, take him off our hands. Otherwise, it’s too sad a sight to see.

Puzzling Pierre

Pierre Poilievre, leader of the Official Opposition, has a new TV ad campaign. At first, I didn’t recognize him, with the camera showing such a close-up of his face. His hair is usually the best guide to his identity; it looks different every time you see it. That’s because he always sleeps on it wrong and in the morning can’t remember how it goes, so he just leaves it as is. In this ad, his hair hardly shows, so tight is the camera on his face. Good editing.
And wait, is this the strident Axe the Tax, Build the Homes, Fix the Budget, Stop the Crime Guy guy? Isn’t that a child over whom he’s solemnly hovering while wearing a distracting wristwatch the size of the child’s head? Yes, it’s Cruz, Poilievre’s son, who just turned three in September. Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the Kingdom of Canada belongs to such as these. What a guy. So willing to share the limelight.
But what’s Poilievre doing? “Everything feels broken in Canada,” he says in the voiceover. He’s not just preaching the cause, he’s putting a jigsaw puzzle together right under his laddie’s nose. He’s showing Cruz where the pieces go and how to push down when you find the right spot. It’s must be hard, too, because there’s no obvious pattern to guide the way. A lot of the pieces he’s using seem to be the same light blue colour. Oh wait, now I see why he’s suddenly making such good progress. He’s working near the edge of the puzzle where each blue piece has a flat side to help with the matching. Poilievre makes it look easy because it is easy.
Pierre Poilievre’s message is that he can put a broken Canada back together again. Even someone as young as his son can understand that. No nuance here. And Poilievre is no longer shouting slogans, he’s offering solutions. The thirty-second ad concludes with the completed puzzle now appearing as a map of Canada with the slogan: “Bring it home.” That’s a great slogan except the usual first two words he uses – “Common Sense” – are missing, without which “Bring it Home” doesn’t resonate as well.
No matter. Everyone knows what happens next. All finished puzzles get displayed for a little while, then they’re dismantled and put back in the box. And everything feels broken all over again.

God and Mammon

I happened to be in Montreal on this day in 2000 when Pierre Trudeau’s funeral service was held. Notre-Dame Basilica was packed with mourners so I stood outside in Place d’Armes, one among the many hundreds listening to the service on loudspeakers and saying our sad farewells.
I was struck at the time by how the very architecture of the surroundings spoke to the always frosty relationship between the former prime minister and the business community. The soaring spires of the Basilica, erected in 1830, dominated one side of the square. On the opposite side stood the head office of Bank of Montreal, built in 1847, with its six sturdy Corinthian columns and stately dome.
For all the political success and personal charisma of Trudeau, the one connection that he never consummated was with business. He and the business community stood apart, just as did the bank and the Basilica, Mammon and God, resolute and unmoving, ever wary and watchful of each other.
Trudeau’s father had been in business but sold his company. As a result, Pierre Trudeau grew up with inherited wealth. There was little need for him to work. Instead, he travelled, taught, took on causes, and wrote. I heard many corporate executives hold his past against him, as if he could have changed his heritage even if he’d sought to, when they disparagingly said, “He never met a payroll.”
Nor did Trudeau have close friends or advisors from business. He embraced people in the arts, academia, labour, and politics but had little concern for commerce beyond what he’d learned at the London School of Economics from Harold Laski, the Marxist.
That studied indifference had serious policy implications. While there may have been no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation, there certainly were intrusions in the boardrooms. I’m no historian, but the government of Pierre Trudeau must have been among the most interventionist in Canada’s annals.
Throughout Trudeau’s regime until he stepped down in 1984, business and Ottawa were at such loggerheads that executives would grouse and wonder what Ottawa could possibly be thinking. For their part, when business did come calling, civil servants and cabinet ministers alike would heave a sigh and say, “What do they want now?”
Some of the blame must fall on business leaders themselves because too few of them run for office. Of course, the promise of strong, solitary leadership was what drew Canadians to Pierre in the first place.
That was why in 1968 I went to see him campaigning in Toronto’s west end with my son, Mark, not yet three years old, perched on my shoulders amid the teeming outdoor crowd. Pierre’s son, Justin, is not half the man his father was, nor does he have any closer connection with business. But, love Pierre or hate him, at least we always knew where he stood when he was in our midst.

 

 

Shhh, quiet please

There are unsung heroes in our lives who are often forgotten. I just realized recently that high on such a list are librarians. Favorite teachers, friendly neighbors, family members, we honor. But librarians do not have the same prominent profile.
This revelation came to me when I recently visited the Yorkville branch of the Toronto Public Library. I had ordered a book online and a few days later received a message that it was ready for pickup. I found it myself on the reserved shelves, scanned my library card on the checkout machine, and – eureka – it was mine for three weeks. At no time did I talk to anyone.
While librarians have a reputation for being quiet in nature, surely it’s taking the trait too far for them to have no contact with their clients. Twasn’t always so. They were an integral part of my life as my father introduced me to books. At bedtime with his help I read out loud the entire series for children by Thornton W. Burgess. My father patiently helped with pronunciations and by the time I started five-year-old kindergarten I was reading at full blast, a head start on my education for which I am forever grateful.
To supply those books, I went to the library in Guelph, Ontario, one among the 2,500 libraries built by Andrew Carnegie with their commanding pillars and domes. For children there was a back-door entrance on the lower level. A trip there had two-fold pleasure. You got to make the twenty-minute walk from home without adult accompaniment and you did the return trip with as many books as you could carry.
A magic moment came when I’d read everything in the children’s library and graduated to the adult titles upstairs. The number of books was greater and the topics far more diverse. I might have been fifteen in Grade Ten when I heard about the James Gould Cozzens book By Love Possessed. When I tried to check it out, the librarian said, “I don’t think your mother would want you reading that,” and put it on the desk behind her. Contrast that with all that’s widely available today without parental knowledge, let alone consent.
While doing research in the Madison Building of the Library of Congress in 2015, there were about a dozen reference books covering my topic. It was hard to tell from the listings which would be most helpful, so a female staffer led me down to the stacks where I was able to retrieve three or four volumes for closer scrutiny. Maybe these books are online now, but reading from home won’t be nearly as much fun.
My past experience with librarians was so enjoyable, I took my own two pre-school children to the library in Ottawa every Saturday morning until they could go on their own. And, later in life, my two grandchildren in Toronto. So thank you Andrew Carnegie and all the ladies who’ve helped me over the years. And I never did read By Love Possessed.

The days of our lives

For the past couple of years, whenever I rode the subway, I always picked out the ten people sitting or standing closest to me and then counted how many of those ten were wearing masks. Nine months ago, it was six riders in masks. Three months ago it was one. Last week I was the only masked warrior. Using this methodology, Covid is over. At least in the minds of those people I was viewing at that moment in time and in that place.
Another way to measure better days have arrived showed up Monday when Amazon told its employees that they all had to come to work five days  a week. You’d think the company that sells so much online wouldn’t mind a few stay-at-homes, but apparently not. By comparison, Canada’s public service gets a break. This month Ottawa finally got around to mandating three days a week in the office, four for executives.
Canada’s largest employers have been following similar rules. At Royal Bank, which employs almost 100,000 people in Canada and the U.S., there was a lot of to-and-fro for a while. In August 2022, for example, CEO David McKay urged employees in an internal memo to “come together more often in person” but didn’t specify exactly how many days a week. A spokesperson later said McKay meant working two or three days a week by the end of September.
By March 2023, the bank said employees could still work from home one or two days. It may be just semantics, but to me that didn’t sound much different from the statement made in the previous year. These days, the bank is describing in online ads something it’s calling “hybrid work” without saying when or where a new employee will carry out that effort.
Despite all such attempts at returning positivity, there are other signs that tell us the downtown Toronto core is still a different place than in pre-Covid times. I’m underground in that part of the world about every six weeks and I can tell you by look and feel that even now there are a lot of people who are working from home. The hallways are still nowhere near as busy as before. The food court with multiple emporiums that straddles CIBC and TD banks used to be packed pre-pandemic. These days, I never have trouble finding a seat to eat my fish and chips from Buster’s Sea Cove. Whenever will we reach safe harbour?

Taking charge

There seems to be a rash of terrible deaths in recent days. Fourteen-year-olds shooting classmates. Someone being set on fire outside a school. Such events lead the news so often that we are all becoming inured to such behaviour. Let’s call it what it is: evil incarnate. I can’t put my finger on exactly when such violence had its beginnings, but my best guess would be twenty-five years ago, about when iPhones began to become all-pervasive.
Contrast what is happening now to the days of your own youth. There was none of this. In my day (you knew I was going to get around to that phrase), we didn’t have a television at home until I was twelve and even then viewing was limited. I blame poor parenting for much of this new world. I recently saw a woman pushing what looked like a three-year-old in a pram. The little girl was clutching an iPhone and watching who-knows-what. It was probably a pointless parade of colours but isn’t that one sure way to get hooked?
Walk any busy street and most people in their twenties and early thirties are coming toward you with their eyes glued to an iPhone. Maybe they’re texting some important message, but my guess is that whatever it is, it could probably wait until after there’s no longer any risk of barging into someone.
I worry even more about the young men holed up in their bedrooms watching porn. As for their girlfriends and eventual spouses, I can’t imagine those guys will hold them at any loving level of esteem. In schools, teachers seem to find it impossible to halt iPhone use in the classroom. How much learning will occur if many student minds are elsewhere? Ontario this month took action and banned classroom use.
Changing the world even more is beyond any one person’s capacity, but how about starting at home with parents? Permissive mothers and fathers are simply not paying attention to what their children are doing and watching. Snapchat’s ceaseless messages and TikTok’s senseless videos govern kids’ lives.
Instead, why don’t parents have long talks with their children at bedtime to discover what’s going on in their minds? Why not limit their time watching both big and little screens? Why not open doors beyond social media? It’s high time parents took back control of their own offspring.

To be or not to be

You know you’re getting older when your youngest grandchild goes off to college. When getting out of a car takes longer than it used to. When you sometimes have to ask for people to repeat themselves.
But you know things are still generally all right when you read a wondrous book like “A River Runs Through It” and revel in the wording that flows as smoothly as the rippling water described therein. When you see a shooting star in the nighttime sky. When you hold someone you love in your arms. When you bite into a juicy peach. When you spend time with friends who go back fifty years. When you read a well-written opinion piece on almost any topic. Being together with family.
There are also multiple far-off memories to hold and to treasure. Parents and grandparents along with aunts and uncles who used to be at table but are now long gone. The first girl you kissed when you were only five years old. Music from the 60s and 70s. Paddling on a five-day wilderness canoe trip while at YMCA camp. 
Also all those teachers and others who taught you how to build the basic platform of what you know. Plus special individuals who showed you what really matters: how to live a life.
A few things bug me like those individuals who complain about a few days of cold weather in the summer but then when it turns hot the next week they complain about that, too. I’d list more such cases but there aren’t many irritants that really rise to the occasion.
That’s because most former exasperations don’t bug me like they once did. Noisy music on the subway. A book that’s a bust. A restaurant meal that’s less tasty than what it should have been. I came to realize that when I worried about such things in the past, fretting didn’t change anything.
Some of that new understanding has arisen from discovering stoicism. Stoicism has its roots in ancient Rome and Greece but I just recently learned about it. Stoicism can be defined by saying it doesn’t matter what happens, what matters is how you deal with it. Who knows what else is out there to learn? As long as I’m still looking for revelations, large and small, life will continue to be worth living. Praise be.

To be decided

Last night as I watched the opening of the four-day Democratic Party convention in Chicago, I was impressed by the high level of speech-making and the choreography of events. Speaker after speaker sounded like a professional with words written that seemed to come – and may have – from a small cadre of writers who produced fine work.
Whether it was New York Governor Kathy Hochul, former presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia, or the three Bidens, daughter Ashley, First Lady Jill, or the President himself, all climbed the pinnacle to give one of the best speeches of their lives.
The president overcame all befuddlement that had previously plagued him. He even told a few jokes on himself, something a wise politician should always include. For example, he quipped that he was too young to join the Senate when he was elected at 29 and “too old” to be president. And there was a frank admission: “I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my career, but I gave my best to you.” I must admit, however, I could have done with more spoken paragraphs and fewer shouted lines throughout his more than fifty minutes at the podium. 
More importantly, the concluding three hours – the event didn’t end until after midnight – rolled along without any interruption from any of those CNN panels of which we’ve seen all too many. For a political junkie like myself, however, the whole thing was an end-to-end success. Kamala Harris, who is scheduled to deliver her main speech Thursday, gave a brief address that was a foretaste of things to come. 
Another aspect why last night worked both at home and in the arena were the signs that individuals held up at the appropriate moment. Each attendee must have been given a pack of signs that included such slogans as USA; We Fight, We Win; Union YES!; Jill; and Thank You Joe. All showed a unity of approach.
In January, when I blogged my predictions for 2024, I said Donald Trump would be elected president. For the first time, I’m happy to say I might have been wrong. Most polls now give Harris a slight edge – but it’s still early days before the November vote.
We don’t yet know where the Democrats and their leaders stand on matters relating to Canada, but a teenaged Harris lived in Montreal for five years and graduated from Westmount High School. Her running mate, Tim Walz, is the governor of Minnesota, a border state, so he knows about trade and other relations with Canada. Those backgrounds are two twigs to hang onto which is better than us trying to make any kind of point to a blustering Donald Trump who thinks the world revolves around him.

See the light

Of all the people I met while living in England in 1987-8, among the most memorable was Bernard Ingham, press secretary to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher was not too available to us out-of-country types, so every Monday while Parliament was in session, Ingham would brief members of the Foreign Press Association. 
Journalists, myself included as a columnist for the Financial Post, who attended the Economic Summit in London in 1988, agreed that of all the briefings by staff of leaders, Ingham was the best. Not just information, either, but performance as well. Ingham’s manner was gruff, his face ruddy, and he had a bushy pair of eyebrows that danced about like two grasshoppers in a sun-filled field.
As for his capacity to offer insights to Thatcher’s thinking, I was reminded of a quote from novelist Edith Wharton, who said, “There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.” Ingham was too brash to be a candle, he was the mirror. 
And an anonymous one at that. The strength of the briefings to the Foreign Press Association was that we got inside information. The weakness was that it was all off the record, which, by tradition means that journalists can use what they hear but cannot attribute any of it directly to the person who said it. So we’d get such phrases as how Thatcher was as “tough as old boots.” As for relations with the U.S., his comment on the attempt by Michael Dukakis to become president was, “We are old enough and long enough in the tooth not to pay much attention to what people say during an election.”
After about six months of such off-the-record sessions, I got fed up and wrote a column that opened with a description of Ingham by name, his role, and said that “a certain mirror was feeling bold and ebullient.” I then went on to refer to him as Mr. Not-For-Attribution or Mr. NFA and used quotes from the briefing.
As you might imagine, I was persona non grata. For several weeks, Ingham refused to hold any Foreign Press Association briefings at all. When he did finally return, I was not allowed to attend. Looking back, I’m comfortable with what I did. Off-the-record is fine once in a while, but not holus-bolus. In a world where there is a candle and a mirror, I’d rather be the journalist who let the light shine in.

Works in progress

Pardon me for blowing my own horn, but I was asked to write a column in the Saturday Business section of the Toronto Star, the largest circulation newspaper in Canada. The criteria set out was to describe people I had interviewed during my journalism career and talk about lessons I learned from those sessions.
So far I’ve done five columns: Martha Billes of Canadian Tire, Conrad Black who needs no introduction, former Royal Bank president Earle McLaughlin, real estate developer Don Matthews, and grocer Galen Weston. Weston was the most recent, appearing last Saturday. The column runs biweekly so look for the next one August 10.
Over the years I’ve written for Maclean’s, Toronto Life, Saturday Night, Fortune, and Financial Post among other outlets but never for the Star. So far, I have to say the editors I’ve dealt with have been knowledgeable and helpful, two ingredients you don’t always find in such folks. The Star recently appointed a new editor-in-chief, Nicole MacIntyre, and has a relatively new publisher, Jordan Bitove, so the place is all fired up as a result. I’m happy to be aboard.
The toughest part of my job is editing my own work down to 800 words, which is my assigned length. I start thinking about who’ll be featured next as early as the Monday after a column has run. Once I’ve picked my subject, I start writing and in some cases produce as many as 2,000 words before spending several days editing that first draft down to nearer the permitted length.
Writing is an interesting process because you’re walking with your words all the time. Ideas combust. You decide an anecdote doesn’t work. You polish a particular phrase until it’s just right. Stay away for an hour and you’re drawn back to do touch-ups. Edit a hard-copy print-out. A new train of thought comes along that might be tucked in or perhaps discarded. Finally, off it goes to an editor who always has helpful advice, writes the headline and chooses a photo.
Next comes the surprise part: response from readers. The column on Earle McLaughlin who was retiring after forty-four years with the bank when I interviewed him in 1980 drew emails from his son and his grandson, both living in Montreal. The column on Conrad Black precipitated numerous outbursts from people who couldn’t believe I found something positive to say about him.
And then, the whole process begins anew. Who to feature? What to say? I can’t imagine having more fun at the keyboard than this.