Rod McQueen's Blog, page 43

Keystone kops

After six years of debate, rulings, protests and pronouncements, the Keystone XL pipeline proposal is finally coming up for a decision. The Republican-dominated U.S. Congress will approve the pipeline carrying bitumen from Canada's oil sands to the gulf coast of Texas. And President Barack Obama has already said he will veto the bill. The consensus is that there aren't enough votes to override the veto so that's it – Keystone is kaput.

To be sure, there's a saying in Washington, nothing is ever over, so it's entirely possible this issue will come to life again, but the likelihood of getting it built in my lifetime is slim. I blame Stephen Harper for this come-uppance. He never established the kind of relationship a prime minister should have with the U.S. president. Canada's message did not get through. All Canada did was sent premiers and other lesser lights to deliver speeches at Washington events where Canadians made up the majority of the audience. There was no full-tilt selling job directed from the top.

But there is a wider message in all of this. The days of building new pipelines may be gone. Energy East, the latest proposal to ship oil from Alberta to a port on the Gulf of St. Lawrence, is meeting stiff opposition from politicians and protesters alike. Pipelines from Alberta to the Pacific seem equally improbable given the native land claims involved.

All of this presents Canada with an opportunity. Why not stop trying to sell our natural resources to foreign lands? Such thinking is reminiscent of the "hewers of wood, drawers of water" syndrome that has plagued our economic history. Instead, let's build refineries in Alberta and Saskatchewan where the resources are found. Refineries mean jobs, products that require more effort, chemicals and plastics that are in demand, all kinds of goods that are further along the production chain than the stuff that oozes out of the ground. With the demise of Keystone, Canada has its last best chance to become an economic powerhouse with industrial activity across a broad number of fronts. Let's grab it.

Live and let die

The Alex Colville retrospective at the Art Gallery of Ontario is spectacular. It is huge, half a dozen rooms worth, all of his best works. Everyone knows at least one: the horse racing toward the train, the woman staring through binoculars, Colville with a pistol on the table. Like any good art, his individual pieces get engraved into your mind. 

Colville seems like a modern painter because of his realistic style, but in fact he is from another era. He was a war artist during the Second World War, painting in The Netherlands with Canadian troops and rendering horrific scenes from Belsen concentration camp. When he was teaching at Mount Allison University in the 1950s and 1960s his work was already so renowned that the National Gallery of Art acquired half a dozen of his canvases. The country supported artists in those days to an extent it no longer does, and we are the lesser for it.

To be sure, Alex Colville was a unique talent. Colville's work in 1940 when he was a student at the Ontario College of Art was already fluid and powerful. Few students since have matched Colville's God-given gift. 

But some aspects of the exhibit are wrong-headed. For reasons best known to the curators, they decided his work could not simply stand on its own. As a result, there's a video discussing writer Alice Munro, prose panels about Colville paintings that appear in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, and strangest of all, an attempt to tie Colville's interest in guns to the Coen brothers movie, No Country for Old Men. Here we have a superstar and we feel we have to bolster his genius by aligning him with others. So Canadian; so unnecessary. 

Merry Christmas

I'm reading for the umpteenth time my favourite piece of seasonal literature, A Child's Christmas in Wales, by Dylan Thomas, and thinking festive thoughts. Season's Greetings and best wishes for 2105 to all those loyal souls who look in on my blog.

Common Ground

With Justin Trudeau and the Liberals ahead of Stephen Harper and the Conservatives by as much as eight points in the final months before a general election, what manner of man is Justin Trudeau and what are his leadership skills? Some answers flow from a reading of his just-published book, Common Ground. First off, he is self-deprecating, no prima donna trying to ride on his father's political coattails. Indeed, he says Pierre was poor at retail politics and did little to nurture the party's grassroots. Justin says his political chops come more from his maternal grandfather, James Sinclair, a minister in the St. Laurent government. On his first day in the House of Commons, Justin wore a Sinclair tartan tie to acknowledge that heritage. 

His mother's mental health is fully acknowledged and lovingly explained. Margaret was bipolar in an era when no one knew much about that condition. One poignant anecdote has Margaret, who had by then moved out and was living with a man named Jimmy, showing up at Justin's school with an urgent request to see him. After Justin was summoned from gym class, a weeping Margaret seized his shoulders and told him she'd been dumped. "He even took his TV," said Margaret. Justin was eleven at the time. When his opponents say he is just like his mother, he claims he knows what they are really saying: Justin is crazy.

From his father, Justin got his ability to speak French, a love of the outdoors, belief in public service and a spirit of adventure. Along the way he also learned what it's like to be an outsider. In middle school at Brébeuf in Montreal, he was regarded as an Anglophone because he spoke English with no accent. He also had to suffer the ignominy of having the infamous photo of Margaret wearing no panties thrust in his face by fellow students. "I learned at Brébeuf not to give people the emotional response they are looking for when they attack personally."

Other lessons on life's path included being a male facilitator in the Sexual Assault Centre at McGill where he was among the first cadre of men in an outreach group leading fraternity members in discussions about date rape. That experience puts in perspective his recent handling of abuse allegations against two Liberal MPs. Justin also details his travels to almost one hundred countries, many of them while backpacking. In Thailand, he got a tattoo of the globe on his left shoulder. He later added a Haida raven tattoo that wraps around the globe.

Surprisingly, Justin's ascent in the Liberal Party was no easy path. Then leader Stéphane Dion was against his candidacy for MP. Justin won the nomination and election in Papineau on his own by building an organization from the ground up. He also learned who to trust and how to inspire loyalty in campaign workers, essential ingredients in any successful run for office.

At times, the book sags as it turns into a civics lesson. But for the most part, the memoir moves along well and demonstrates less personal vanity than you might except. There is too little policy pronouncement for my taste. Instead, this is a book about Justin the person that makes for useful and entertaining reading as a nation makes up its mind.

 

Nature morte

The twenty-one works by Paul Cézanne on display in an exhibit entitled "The World is an Apple" are a coup for the Art Gallery of Hamilton (AGH) which is celebrating its centenary. The still lifes by one of my favourite nineteenth-century French artists feature pears, ginger pots, flowers and skulls in addition to the aforementioned apples. Cézanne's work is noted for the angles he uses. In one painting it appears as if he moved his easel several times to render the tableau with no regard for the wonky perspective that results. 

Unlike Vincent Van Gogh who described his paintings in detail, we know very little about Cézanne's methodology. Did he set out fruit and pots on a table and complete the work while the fruit was still fresh, or did he replace items he ate for lunch or went punky? As for his skulls, painted in his later years, they give new meaning to the word haunted. 

This exhibit is particularly noteworthy because it brings together works from a number of public and private collections in North America and Europe. Former AGH director of curatorial affairs Benedict Leca organized the exhibit in collaboration with the prestigious Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia.

Leca, who came to the AGH from the Cincinnati Art Museum two years ago, is on the move again, this time to become director of the Redwood Library and Anthenaeum in Newport, Rhode Island, after being passed over for the role of president and CEO of the AGH. Leca's fruitful labours, however, remain on view until February 8, 2015.

My daughter, Dr. Alison J. McQueen, a professor of art history at McMaster University, will deliver a public lecture about Cézanne at 7:30 p.m. on Monday January 19, 2015 as part of her Friends of Art History series. The exact location of the talk on the McMaster campus in Hamilton will be announced closer to the date. 

A lifetime of friendship

I had lunch with my three oldest friends today. We all attended the University of Western Ontario 50 years ago. We've held this regular Christmas gathering at the Old Mill for a long time. As a first step we declared that matters of personal health – the organ recital I call it – were not open for discussion. Otherwise, you get into a lot of kvetching and complaining. We did, however, congratulate ourselves on surviving for another year.

Among the four of us there is a lawyer, a dentist, an accountant and me, the writer. Topics ranged from Stephen Harper (dangerous for the country declared the lawyer), with the rest of us peppering him about his wrong-headed description. There was a general agreement it's time for a change in Ottawa but not because of any clear and present dangers. Other points agreed upon included the disaster that is the Ontario deficit and the hopefulness we felt about Toronto Mayor John Tory – as long as he can muster the necessary leadership skills to make a difference when dealing with the diverse views of city council.

At times, the arguments about everything from the world of business to the mess at the CBC became heated, as they always do. Just as quickly the topic changes and new debates take over. It's been like this for years; no one ever gets angry with anyone else. 

Another thing that's predictably the same is the character of those involved. Despite the ups and downs of our different lives, despite our differing experiences, we are still at root recognizably the same people who were together on campus so long ago. Some aspects of life are immutable. True friends most of all. 

Money up the flue

This past Monday was a windy day in Ontario, with westerly howls reaching 100 km/hr from Windsor through Toronto and beyond. Fallen trees and branches brought down power lines and crushed vehicles, highways were closed, a stained glass church window was damaged in Hamilton and a roof ripped off at a Burlington airport. A tornado was confirmed near Mildmay.

While communities cleaned up after the path of destruction, the expense to citizens continues, according to former TD Bank President Robin Korthals, a graduate engineer with a Harvard MBA, who follows such matters closely. On Monday Ontario's wind turbines generated record amounts of power that we did not need. Because of the foolish arrangements agreed to by the Ontario Liberal government, we had to buy the wind power despite the fact that it costs about five times what eventual users are charged.

To make matters worse, because there was excess capacity, we couldn't use power from the Darlington nuclear plant so they just steamed off everything they produced that day. Since we still had power excess to our use, Ontario sold electricity to both Michigan and Quebec at rates that were lower than their costs of production, power that they could then resell at a greater profit than normal to their lucky citizens. 

The cost to Ontario for this one-day fiasco? About $10 million. As Korthals says, "Why do we only elect lawyers and never engineers?" Or as my father, who was also an engineer, might have said, "Money up the flue."

A Renaissance man

Universities tend to attract donations for the STEM faculties – science, technology, engineering and mathematics – with the liberal arts often left behind.  That's not the case at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont., where yesterday L. R. (Red) Wilson gave $2.5 million to extend for another five years the L. R. Wilson Institute for Canadian History he launched five years ago with a similar $2.5 million endowment. Wilson served as chancellor of McMaster and has also donated a $10-million lead gift for a new building, now under construction, that will house the humanities, social sciences and his beloved Institute.

I attended the announcement lunch yesterday along with members of McMaster's administration and faculty, as well as friends of Wilson's and friends of Canadian history in general. McMaster President Patrick Deane started his speech with a quote from Wilson's citation when he was named an Officer in the Order of Canada. It says "he has been involved in many fund-raising activities and volunteers his time to help the community." Deane called the statement a classic piece of understatement.

I first met Wilson in 1978 when he was deputy minister of industry and tourism for Ontario. I was at Maclean's, working on an article that described the behind-the-scenes negotiations at the Calgary Stampede among Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, Ontario Premier Bill Davis and Ford President Roy Bennett to secure government financial support for a $500-million Ford Motor Co. engine plant in Windsor, Ont. Even in the midst of such dealings, Wilson showed his lighter side, challenging me to discover his middle name (his full name is Lynton Ronald Wilson). When he was growing up in hard-scrabble Port Colborne, Ont., everyone had a nickname. His was Red, because of his red hair, and he's been known as Red ever since.

After successful careers in the federal foreign service and provincial civil service, Wilson moved to the private sector where he held senior roles at various firms including Redpath Industries and BCE Inc. Wilson's view of education is that everyone – whether they become medical doctors, engineers or business leaders – should have a grounding in the humanities as part of their understanding of the world and how it works. Unlike some people who hold views but do little about them, Wilson has put his money into the Wilson Institute's seminars, scholarships, publishing prizes, post-doctoral fellows (a dozen so far) and adjunct members of faculty. 

If there is a Renaissance man in Canada today, it is Red Wilson. With enrolments in the humanities down 15 per cent across the board at all Ontario universities, would that there were more supporters like him. 

 

Fair for all

For twenty-five years Access Copyright has gathered payments from sources that use written or visual content produced by Canadian writers and artists and then distributes those monies to the writers and artists who created the original work. It isn't a huge amount, but not insignificant. Last year my payment was $995 for material that I had produced, mainly in books, material on which I hold the copyright. This year the amount was $770, a drop of 23 per cent.

Did certain of my material suddenly evaporate or did the copyright expire? No, some users of the material decided they'd no longer pay. In the last eighteen months nearly every Canadian university, college and school board (outside Quebec) has decided they're not going to pay for published Canadian content that's distributed to students either in photocopied or digital format.

Coursepacks, as they are commonly called, are handed out free by profs in place of a list of textbooks students have to buy. So if each member of an MBA class receives a copy of the chapter in my book Manulife about CEO succession in 2008 when the board chose Donald Guloien or a chapter from BlackBerry on how an entrepreneurial Mike Lazaridis dropped out of the University of Waterloo to launch Research In Motion in 1984, those chapters now cost the institution nothing.

I'm all in favour of keeping costs down for students, but this is institutional theft. Surely no educator would condone students stealing music by downloading a singer's songs for free, why is content I produced now placed in the same open-to-abuse category?

Educators like to call what they're doing "fair dealing," but as Access Copyright notes on its site, "Nothing in the new copyright act or recent Supreme Court decisions suggests that 'fair dealing' for education extends to the deliberate, systematic copying of published content for aggregation and delivery to support student instruction."

It's entirely possible that individual teachers and profs are unaware that they are stealing, which is my definition of taking something that belongs to others without permission or payment. But administrators know exactly what they are doing and should immediately cease using Canadian artists, writers and publishers as a crutch to cut costs. Fair dealing should be fair for all. 

A hit and two misses

Too busy writing until recently, I finally found some time to read. Two out of the three books I just finished were disappointing. The first is by Gord Pitts: Fire in the Belly: How Purdy Crawford Rescued Canada and Changed the Way We Do Business. Here was a case where I was a fan of both the writer and the subject yet came away empty.

My first complaint is in some ways petty. Normally, subjects are referred to by their surnames. Pitts didn't do that. Sometimes he called him "Purdy" which is a tad too friendly for me. Sometimes he called him "Crawford." Sometimes he referred to him using both "Purdy" and "Crawford" – in the same paragraph. That's poor editing and, after a while, just plain irritating.

Second, I was looking forward to understanding at last exactly how Crawford solved the problem of $35 billion in third-party asset-backed paper that suddenly was worthless in 2007. I've never understood how that worked, and after all, this is the supposed core of the book. After I read that section I was no further ahead on that nor how he "changed the way we do business." I agree that Crawford should be celebrated as a lawyer, leader in corporate governance, and mentor, but the promise of the book's title isn't sufficiently backed up.

My second disappointment was Allan Levine's Toronto: A Biography of a City. The book starts in the dim past with Etienne Brule, wanders its way through the nineteenth century, and goes right up to modern times. Everybody and their uncle contributed, read, or helped on this book, which is a daunting read at 496 pages. (Levine kindly cites my book on the Eatons.) Even so, Levine's coverage of the powerful individuals and institutions based in Toronto seems unusually limited. Toronto is, after all, the financial capital of Canada.

There is, for example, precious little on the Big Five Banks or the people who run them, arguably the country's single most powerful oligopoly. Nor is their much on investment bankers, mutual fund companies, insurance firms or any aspect of financial services. As for the Toronto Stock Exchange, Levine even gets the location wrong, saying it's at King and Bay although it moved from Bay Street in 1985. And who, I'd like to know, has ever referred to the Eaton Centre as the Eaton's Centre? 

A much more thorough and thoughtful book is Roy McMurtry's Memoirs and Reflections. McMurtry takes the reader through an ever-changing Toronto and Ontario from his days on the University of  Toronto Varsity Blues, through his time as attorney general in the Bill Davis government, to his years as Chief Justice of Ontario. Despite its prodigious 534 pages, if I had been the editor, I wouldn't have deleted a word.

McMurtry's advice after a lifetime of service and leadership is a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail." Other authors should heed those words.