Rod McQueen's Blog, page 49

Hopes, dreams and aspirations

Rather than make foolish predictions this year, here's the top seven things I'd like to see: 

1. The Ontario Securities Commission charge some high mucky-muck we all know with a criminal offence, rather than just the usual passing parade of small-fry pump-and-dump artists.

2. The rear-end of Rob Ford in this fall's mayoralty race. No apology required when he exits public life.

3. Prime Minister Stephen Harper offer the same loyalty to staff and MPs that he expects from them.

4. Well-written stories worth reading in my local papers.

5. Tolls on major Toronto roads to raise revenue and reduce gridlock.

6. Nicholas Brody of Homeland come back to life.

7. As Robertson Davies once said, a retractable form of suicide for Canadians in February.

The crystal ball revisited

Time to revisit the predictions I made a year ago for 2013. You can read them here or believe me when I describe them.

My first idea was so far off base I got both parts wrong. I said that Sandra Pupatello would be chosen leader of the Ontario Liberal Party and be defeated in an election later in the year by Tim Hudak and the Progressive Conservatives. Of course, Kathleen Wynne got the nod, there was no election, and Hudak doesn’t look like he will ever win despite the government’s multiple failings. One wrong.

Second, I said that the the all-new Blue Jays, widely touted by Las Vegas oddsmakers to win the World Series, would NOT win it all. Got that one right. Third, I said Hilary Clinton would take herself out of contention for president. That did not happen and it looks like she’s gearing up to announce this year that she will run. Two wrong.

Fourth, I said the TSX would rise by double digits. With an increase of 9.6 per cent the market almost, but not quite, made it. Three wrong. Fifth, I said that the Bank of Canada would finally increase interest rates. Even a change in the governor did not alter the central bank’s as-low-as-she-goes thinking. There was no increase. Four wrong.

Sixth, I said gross domestic product would rise by a middling 2 per cent. Final figures are not yet in, but according to StatsCan, the October-over-October increase was a relatively healthy 2.7 per cent. Five wrong. Seventh, with Rob Ford facing a formidable court challenge, I gamely predicted he’d still be mayor at year’s end. Little did I know how much fiasco and farce he could face and still survive, even if in name only. Two right.

My abysmal record, two of seven, gives me a .286 average. If I were a major league baseball player, that would be OK. But as a savant, no one should believe me ever again. I hereby announce I will make no predictions for 2014. Instead, I’m drawing up a list of things I’d like to see happen in 2014. Come back in a couple of days to read my hopes, dreams and aspirations.

Disorder of Canada

When the Order of Canada was launched in 1967 I had the naive notion that it would honour only a select few deserving Canadians. After all, the high-minded motto is Desiderantes Meliorem Patriam, which can be translated as, “They desire a better country.” How many people could pass muster to make it over that stratospheric bar? Well, it turns out, quite a few.

Another in the semi-annual list of honorees has just been released and there are far too many names announced that don’t deserve such status. Indeed, the number of winners is beginning to be embarrassing. While the top level, Companion, is limited, the lowest level, member, seems as easy to get as going online and applying. Between the last two lists, December and June, fully 101 individuals were named as members and can wear the special stylized snowflake on anything they want from their parkas to their pyjamas.

My problem is that people seem to be named simply for doing their jobs. It’s not as if all the winners come with long explanations such as they ran a university, raised millions for the eradication of polio, and looked after 24 foster children. Often, the reason they won is explained in a single sentence and seems to describe one function.

In case there isn’t already enough hoopla about so little, there’s even a new travelling exhibit called It’s An Honour! that is visiting communities across Canada. You can follow the whereabouts of the tractor-trailer with its 1,000 sq ft mobile exhibit on Facebook and Twitter. In addition to the Order of Canada, also aboard are real honours such as the Victoria Cross.

I wish I were proud about all this, but I’m not. There are those who will say I’m just jealous because I don’t have an Order of Canada. I can tell you this, if I were offered one, I would turn it down. They’re already scraping the bottom of the barrel in the case of some members. Imagine if they asked me. Why, I’d have to assume I must be the last man alive who didn’t already have one.

Christmas wishes

With grateful thanks at Christmas to my faithful readers.

I hope that 2014 will bring you good health and good humour.

The Wynning card

Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne’s Christmas card this year bears not your usual photo. Typically, there’s the elected member, a cheerful and long-suffering spouse of the opposite sex, a couple of cherubic kids, and the requisite Golden Lab. In Wynne’s case, this first family is like no other ever seen in Canada. In addition to Wynne’s two daughters, a son, son-in-law and two granddaughters, there’s also her female spouse, Jane Rounthwaite. The two women have been married for eight years.

It would have been oh so easy for Wynne to have used instead a portrait of herself or a still from the Liberal Party TV commercial that shows her running, alone, on a backroad. “Here are things most people don’t know about me,” says the opening line of her voiceover. Well, we knew about the gay marriage, and we were okay with that, but still, I must admit that the Christmas card did make my eyes pop.

What a refreshing change has been wrought in Ontario where eons of elected officials have hewed to custom. Now, if we could just get good government. of whatever stripe. That would be a nice change, too.

Brothers Plumbing

Some tradespeople are better than others, some charge more than others, and some charge the earth. Brothers Plumbing, 130 Osler St., Toronto, falls into the latter category.

I’ve used the firm before so Brothers was my first call recently when I had a running toilet. Marcus replaced the flush valve and flapper. Since he was already at my house, I thought I’d have two other small jobs done at the same time: replacing leaky pop-up plugs in a tub and a sink. Big mistake. Turns out Brothers charges by the job, so I now had inadvertently asked for three jobs. As a result, each was billed according to some price book as if they were separate visits.

For the new flapper and valve, I paid $426 plus tax for parts and labor. The same job on the same toilet by a different man from the same company in April 2011 cost $250 for parts and labour, so Brothers has jacked up prices by 70 per cent in less than three years.

The two stoppers cost $40 each and I was billed $150 in labour as a separate line item on my invoice for that work. The retail price for a valve and flapper is about $30. Even allowing 100 per cent markup on parts, the labour cost for this latest work on the toilet was $366. Add the $150 labour for stoppers and the total labor was $516. Let’s allow one hour travel time for that initial one-hour visit, and another hour for two return visits with the stoppers, for a total of three hours. I think I’m being generous in my computation, but I’m prepared to err on the side of fairness. The hourly rate for labour works out to $172. Who cares about losing all these $30-an-hour factory jobs when plumbing repair pays so well?

The Lambert legacy

Amid the flurry of  skyscrapers rising in Toronto, there are precious few architectural gems. The only eye-catching designs are the L Tower by Daniel Libeskind at the Sony Centre and the Absolute World condominiums – aka Marilyn Monroe – by Yansong Ma in Mississauga.

I spent 90 minutes recently rediscovering the Toronto-Dominion Centre and have decided to anoint those six buildings as Toronto’s best design. The trouble with the TD Centre is that’s been around for so long that everyone takes it for granted. It nearly didn’t happen and the fact that it exists at all is due to the vision of one man, Allen Lambert, Chairman of TD Bank from 1961 until he retired in 1978. Lambert was introduced to art and architecture by David Rockefeller of Chase Manhattan Bank when the U.S. institution sought to buy TD. The takeover was quashed by Ottawa, but Lambert began to haunt art galleries and think about design.

At the time, Toronto had seen few new office buildings for decades. Developer William Zeckendorf, who had built Montreal’s Place Ville Marie, approached Lambert in the early 1960s with plans for a concrete tower that Lambert rejected. Lambert turned instead to Cemp Investments, a Bronfman firm, a move which brought in Phyllis Lambert (no relation), Sam Bronfman’s daughter. The Bronfmans had just built a new headquarters for Seagram on New York’s Park Avenue. The architect Phyllis picked for that structure was Ludwig Mies van der Rohe who was also chosen for the TD centre. In the end, New York got but one Mies while Toronto has six plus the banking pavilion in the International Style.

Until the TD Centre was begun, there was still some question where downtown Toronto would be situated: King and Bay or Yonge and Bloor. Allen Lambert made the decision. And his legacy didn’t stop there. As a Centennial project in 1967, TD bought 100 pieces of Inuit sculpture. His successor, Dick Thomson, in 1981 added another 100 works curated by the Smithsonian for an 11-city U.S. tour. The magnificent collection is displayed on the mezzanine in the South Tower on Wellington Street.

To my mind the bronze-tinted glass and black steel towers of the TD Centre look as fresh and as stunning as they did when they were completed from 1967 to 1991. Allen Lambert, who continued to be active in business until his death in 2002 at 90, used to joke that there were three ages of man: youth, middle-age and “You’re looking well.” In his case, because of his unique contribution to the downtown core, I think there’s a fourth age: eternal.

How to save National Post

On September 17, 2001, I was fired from my position as senior writer at National Post. I was just back from holidays, and not a little shocked. But many others were sent packing that day, too, almost one-third of the entire newsroom staff. At the meeting to inform all of us, Editor Ken Whyte praised our skills and said that no more talented group of journalists had ever been assembled. Then they told us to go back to our desks where we would find that email and other computer access had also been terminated. We had two hours to gather up personal effects and vacate the premises. “If we’re so wonderful,” I asked, “why are we being treated like common thieves?” There was no answer.

After the meeting I thanked Ken for the opportunity to work for him and told him he was destined to be the finest journalist of his generation, a comment quoted in a column the next day by Christie Blatchford, who later left and was hired back. The only other high profile hire since 2001 has been Andrew Coyne. Ken has indeed done well and now runs an entire division at Rogers. I’ve done just fine, too. I don’t have a day job anymore – not unusual after almost 30 years in journalism – and instead have been focusing on my books. Since 2001 I have written seven books including a just-completed ghosting job for a memoir by Donald S. Macdonald, a Trudeau cabinet minister and the man who chaired the Royal Commission that lead to free trade with the U.S.

National Post, launched in 1998, was a bold experiment. I was part of the initial crew because proprietor Conrad Black bought The Financial Post, where I worked, and rolled it together with other staff he’d assembled. For a while it was a glorious place to be. Ken Whyte’s leadership style was “let a thousand flowers bloom.” At one point we had more readers in most major markets than The Globe and Mail.

For the last decade, with the exception of the aforementioned hires, National Post has been on a money-losing downward spiral. Every few months more employees are let go as revenues plummet. The paper is but a shadow of what might have been. I thought it would have disappeared long since. Paul Godfrey is the latest CEO hired to save National Post and the remains of the Southam chain at what’s now called Postmedia Network Inc. He’s halfway to finding another $180 million in savings so it can survive. I wish him well.

In the last year the company lost $154 million so neither prosperity nor profitability seem close at hand. Yet Godfrey received a 50 per cent year-over-year increase in annual compensation for 2013 to $1.7 million, even though he didn’t reach all his performance targets, according to the Management Information Circular released Wednesday. He was also paid other compensation of $151,338, an amount that included entertainment expenses of $79,742. Here’s my respectful two-part suggestion to Paul Godfrey: Turn back your $579,000 bonus and start paying for entertainment from your own pocket. Take the resulting $660,000 you saved the company and hire half a dozen excellent journalists. You never know, they might produce breaking news stories that attract readers and drive new revenue. As a strategy, don’t you think it’s worth a go? You’ve tried everything else.

The Campaigns

Last night’s launch of the five-part documentary series The Campaigns on CPAC was excellent. Entitled The Great Free Trade Debate the first episode covered the 1988 election featuring party leaders Brian Mulroney, John Turner and Ed Broadbent. Beginning with a recent campaign was wise; next Sunday’s goes all the way back to 1917.

In addition to excellent footage and production values, there were insightful interviews from various Mulroney spear-carriers including Harry Near, Hugh Segal and Marjorie LeBreton, all of whom told me things I didn’t know. For example, after Turner topped Mulroney in the debate, Norman Atkins advised Mulroney to hoist free trade as a campaign issue by telling voters he would hold a referendum later. The Prime Minister wisely rejected the idea. He would have looked foolish. After all, the election was the referendum.

The series, produced by Catherine Christie-Luff, looks at four other campaigns: 1917, 1945, 1968 and 1925-6. I was interviewed on the 1968 campaign wearing my hat as press secretary to Robert Stanfield even though my time with him didn’t begin until 1970. That episode airs December 15. Did I reveal any secrets? Tune in and see.

Trying to outFox

If I were designing a new news show, it would probably look a lot like Kevin Newman Live that debuted last night on CTV News Channel. The trouble is that the format doesn’t work in real time. There was no content, just blather.

Former Rob Ford staffer Mark Twohey was the in-studio lead item but didn’t have much to add to explain the current fracas at Toronto City Hall. The best Twohey could come up with was to say that Ford could only chose between “fight or flight” and since the mayor has nowhere to go, he’s staying to fight. It’s a phrase that Twohey has used before.

The double-ender with California-based addiction specialist and interventionist Candy Finnigan was weird. In diagnosing Ford from afar she urged him to go into rehab. I guess we knew that already. Finnigan even mangled the cliche by referring to Ford as “a bull in a china closet.”

Early in the show, Newman read tweets. An OK idea but maybe for much later in the lineup. He also told us excitedly how members of the audience could connect with him via Twitter and Facebook. But the newsroom set behind Newman was two long rows of empty chairs. Where was his team? In a show that’s supposed to be about connecting, the nothingness was downright eerie.

I faded after the Chris Hadfield singing in space item and how it was Hadfield’s son who gave him the idea to play air guitar. The 30-year veteran broadcaster is trying too hard to be chipper and hip. Everything was so breezy that somehow the news of the day just got blown away with the fall leaves.