Rod McQueen's Blog, page 52

Beyond Politics

I finally watched the six shows I taped that first aired July 1 on CPAC when Catherine Clark interviewed all six living former prime ministers for her show, Beyond Politics. What a concept! What a disappointment! Too much time is spent during each of the 30-minute sessions rummaging around in the younger years of the men. (More about the only woman, Kim Campell, in a moment.) In the case of Catherine’s father, Joe, as well as John Turner, Brian Mulroney, Jean Chretien, and Paul Martin Jr., the questions too often let the PMs talk about familiar ground: Clark as a newspaper reporter and Turner as an athlete. Or the push by parents to ensure Mulroney and Chretien had good educations. Or how much Martin loved his mother. These narratives are all well known to anyone who has read their memoirs or followed their lives, which I daresay describes most of the Canadian Public Affairs Channel (CPAC ) audience.

The best interview by far is with Kim Campbell. The rest were not asked, nor did they offer, anything they’d learned or done Beyond Politics, which seems to me should have been the point of this series. Campbell has not only achieved self-knowledge but also was willing to share her thoughts all salted with some self-deprecating humour. “I had political retirement thrust upon me by Canadian voters,” she says, with tongue firmly planted in her cheek. “Losing was a bit like having gum on your shoe. You can’t get away from it.”

Following Campbell’s defeat she taught a course in gender and power at the Harvard Kennedy School. Her thesis was based on the notion that when someone comes along who is not the usual office-holder in a role such as PM, people need to validate their negative feelings. Chretien, she said, could make a mistake and be forgiven because he’d been in Ottawa for a long time. In her case, as the first female prime minister, there was no such forgiveness factor. She saw herself as a “piñata,” particularly for journalists in the Parliamentary Press Gallery.

Campbell has been trying to guide women to better deal with the culture of politics. She quotes the first female U.S. Secretary of State, Madeleine Allbright, as saying, “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.” Campbell would also like to alter the electoral system so that men and women are elected to office on a 50/50 basis to better reflect society.

In the end, Campbell survived all the slings and arrows of losing. To her, living well is the best revenge, saying, “I’m still capable of accepting love and loving.” No man would talk like that, about his feelings, or overcoming hurt. But her honesty made for the best interview. The men all got away with retelling for umpty-teenth time the petty fabrications of their lives.

End of an era

The announcement by Marjory LeBreton that she is resigning as Government Leader in the Senate brings to an end – almost – one of the longest-serving working lives – 50 years – of anyone on Parliament Hill. I say almost because she will continue to sit as a Senator for another two years before retiring at 75.

Marjory demonstrates the classic case of how women in her generation got ahead. They started at the bottom and worked their way up by dint of sheer effort, moxie and common sense, characteristics she has in abundance. Marjory started working for the Progressive Conservative Party in 1962 and by 1965 was accompanying Prime Minister John Diefenbaker as he campaigned across Canada by train.

When I first met Marjory in 1970 she was part of the four-member steno pool in Robert Stanfield’s office. As you might imagine, the Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition is the last hope for many in society who write lengthy letters about everything from conspiracy theories through UFOs to how their furniture talks to them. Whenever there was a full moon, Marjory would shake her head and say, “Well, the nuts out there will be filling our mail box this week.” And they always did.

Marjory continued to work for the PC leader after Joe Clark was elected but really came into her own under Brian Mulroney who put her in charge of patronage appointments. It’s a role you’d think would be easy, overseeing happy recipients of government largesse. But for every satisfied person there are ten others who got nothing and complained bitterly. Marjory was fair, forthright, and handled the role with aplomb. In 1993, Mulroney appointed her to the Senate. That would have been a sufficient capstone to her career but she made the leap from Progressive Conservative to “just” Conservative and Prime Minister Stephen Harper named her Government Leader in the Senate, a position with cabinet rank.

Women in business have not succeed in anything like similar numbers as women in politics. Jalynn Bennett, for example, started as a secretary in the investment department of Manufacturers Life and rose to become a senior executive. Bennnet was also among the first female members of the previously boys-only York Club and Toronto Club. But she never became a CEO. Only a very few women have reached that pinnacle, less than ten among the top 500 firms.

By contrast, among today’s thirteen leaders of the provinces and territories, six are women, and they oversee about 75 per cent of all voters. That so many women reached the pinnacle in politics is due to Marjory and many others like her who made sure that their pioneering paths carried along other women in their wake.

Happy Canada Day

I’ve been fortunate over the years to travel tens of thousands of miles in Canada. There’s more yet to see, but here are a few of my favourite sights so far. The steep streets of St. John’s with colourful houses tipping into the sea. The best nap ever one afternoon on the sloping grass outside the Hotel Goose in Gander. A double rainbow over Keltic Lodge after driving Cape Breton’s Cabot Trail. Irish Coffee in the Victory Bar of the Lord Nelson Hotel one unusually cold day in July. The two evocative sites near St. Margaret’s Bay commemorating the crash of Swissair 111 in 1998.

Seeing the endangered Northern Right Whale in the Bay of Fundy and the Atlantic Puffin, the clown of birds, on Machias Seal Island. The Saint John River Valley, prettiest drive in eastern Canada. Any seafood dish at Cy’s in Moncton, sadly now closed. Perce Rock in the Gaspe. A night at La Pinsonniere, a marvellous hotel in the Charlevoix region with views across the St. Lawrence River. Arvida, a town bursting with energy and carved out of the bush, like so many in Canada, to tap our natural resources. Bagels fresh from the oven, 24 hours a day, at Montreal’s Fairmount Bagel. The statuary atop Mary Queen of the World Cathedral. The sight, when I was fifteen, of dozens of pretty secretaries leaving the Sun Life building on Dominion Square at quitting time.

The coldest walk in the world, on a January day from the Chateau Laurier to Centre Block on Parliament Hill, with the wind whipping across the Ottawa River from the Gatineau Hills. Canoeing the Severn River through Gloucester Pool to Beausoleil Island in Georgian Bay. Thousands of swallows resting on the beach at Point Pelee after flying across Lake Erie during spring migration. The Terry Fox Monument on the Trans-Canada Highway outside Thunder Bay with views of the Sleeping Giant.

The desert sand dunes east of Brandon. The Qu’Appelle Valley; spitting image of France. The sign outside Biggar, Saskatchewan: New York is big, but this is Biggar. The rustic Banff Springs Hotel perched amidst the Rockies. Aurora borealis in Yellowknife. Prettiest drive in Western Canada: the Nelson River Valley. The Capilano Suspension Bridge and the white sails of Canada Place. Butchart Gardens and afternoon tea at the Empress Hotel.

Black and BlueBerry

When I wrote my first blog post about my new BlackBerry Q10 a week after I’d acquired it, I was basically happy. Worth the wait, I said. Now that six more weeks have passed, I can say that I like the phone, texting, the camera and the ability to share photos. But I am revising my overall view and am joining the growing chorus of frustrated owners.

I am still having trouble, as I indicated earlier, knowing what type of action to use and with what amount of vigour. When closing contacts or calls on the screen, you have to use your thumb in a scrubbing motion starting off the screen and be sure to hit the edge on the way by. In the summer, when hands can be sweaty, this move is proving to be particularly difficult.

With my previous BlackBerry, when you deleted an email, it was deleted on the PC and vice versa. No more. You now have to delete everything twice. And there used to be a handy “delete all” possibility that showed up automatically. On the Q10 you have to find the “more” button and carefully touch all emails you want deleted. It took a while, but I figured out that thumb scrubbing’s no good. Using my pinky finger was best. And somehow the syncing process means that emails I write no longer end up in the Sent folder on Outlook even when I write them on my PC. No one has been able to figure out why.

It took an hour to install BlackBerry Link even with the help of someone who knew what he was doing. Now that it’s installed, for the life of me I can’t find any reason to have it. I laboured under the misconception that somehow this would help get apps. But going on BlackBerry World to download any of the purported 90,000 apps is a joke. All I can find is games and other nonsense. My total app download consists of CBS Sports, Battery Watch, and Flashlight. My iPad makes this so simple and offers so much choice.

If I use the Q10 phone for more than ten minutes, the unit gets hot. I can’t imagine what that’s doing to my brain even though I try to hold it away from my head. The screen is so small that when you look up something using the browser, the page is unreadable. Only by expanding the page can you read anything and then you see only a few words at a time of an article or Wiki entry.

As the author of BlackBerry: The Inside Story on Research In Motion, published in 2010, I am astounded that the powers that be took so long, got rid of so much good from the past, and did not produce an easy-to-use happiness-making product. During the past eight years I’ve had three BlackBerry models beginning with the 7290. I liked them all. I am going to continue to struggle with the Q10 but, if anyone asks, I don’t recommend it.

Unanswered questions

I was busy last week and did not see Peter Mansbridge interview Pamela Wallin. No one I’ve asked watched the show either which may say something about The National and the diminished size of its audience. Fortunately, in this day and age, everything is available, including a complete transcript.

I watched a video of the 36-minute interview, read the transcript and I must say that I still don’t fully understand Wallin’s problem. It’s not her residency, that’s all been approved. It’s not charging per diems for Senate work when she’s on holiday as Mike Duffy has allegedly done. Wallin claims she doesn’t even put in expense claims for entertainment. Her problem comes from flying to Halifax or Edmonton or Toronto to deliver a speech or attend a board meeting, then heading home to Saskatchewan and putting in expense claims for all the flights involved. “So money is not in my pocket, the money is in the pocket of the airlines.” Wallin says she and her staff got onto this first before others raised the issue and have been working “night and day” since to correct it. In so doing, she’s already repaid $38,000.

For that sizeable group of expenses, I presume she concluded that those flights were not Senate business and should not have been claimed. “Those repayments I made instantly because it was clear that they were mistakes.” Even giving a generous allowance for a per flight cost of $2,000, that’s nineteen flights about which she made a mistake. That’s a lot of erroneous assumptions.

Wallin declares there was nothing in this for her nor does she feel her actions came from a sense of entitlement. But there was something in it for her. Someone else, in this case the Senate, was paying for her flights even though they weren’t for Senate business. “I don’t think I’m taking advantage or bilking the system. Everybody who’s ever filled in an expense claim in their office knows how frustrating it is. how difficult it is and it sort of piles up.” Mike Duffy fell back on a similar argument about how in the confusion of it all he made mistakes.

Wallin, like everyone else, has been waiting for the outside auditor’s report from Deloitte. Begun last November, we’re all still waiting. Auditors can produce annual reports on multinationals with billions in revenue in far less time. Why is one individual’s expenses so complicated?

We’re now stuck with two former journalists – Duffy and Wallin – wreaking damage on an already beleaguered institution. It’s long past time to abolish the Senate. Until that happens, please, no more journalists in the Red Chamber. They seem able to ask questions but not answer them.

My counter ’tis of thee

Sears Canada has been in decline for half a dozen years but the news today that it will be closing its stores in Yorkdale, Square One and maybe Scarborough Town Centre – three of the busiest malls in the Toronto area – mean that the company is finished with Canada. It’s ironic, given that Sears Roebuck & Co. was the first of the U.S. department stores to come here.

It was 1952 when General E. R. Wood, chairman of Sears Roebuck, struck a deal with Edgar Burton, president of Simpson’s, for joint ownership of the two companies’ catalogue and mail-order businesses. The U.S. five-and-dime chains were already here – Woolworth since 1919 and Kresge in 1928 – but the arrival of Sears changed retailing in Canada forever.

The first Simpsons-Sears store opened in Hamilton, Ont., in 1954, followed quickly by six more aimed directly at the market leader, Eaton’s. The Simpsons-Sears catalogue also took on Eaton’s with bigger books and better deals. By 1976 Eaton’s catalog was kaput. By 1999, Eatons was bankrupt and Sears bought nineteen of their stores, including the one in the flagship Eaton Centre. Just another irony in the fire.

Now Sears appears to be pulling out of all major locations across Canada. Last year, Sears closed in Vancouver, Calgary and Ottawa to make way for another U.S. chain, Nordstrom. The Canadian department stores are long gone: Simpsons, Woodwards, The Bay, Zeller’s and Eaton’s. Now we’ve got one U.S. outfit taking over from another. I guess that’s progress of a sort. Canadian ownership has become so thin on the ground that we don’t have anything left to sell.

My store ’tis of thee

Sears Canada has been in decline for half a dozen years but the news today that it will be closing its stores in Yorkdale, Square One and maybe Scarborough Town Centre – three of the busiest malls in the Toronto area – mean that the company is finished with Canada. It’s ironic, given that Sears Roebuck & Co. was the first of the U.S. department stores to come here.

It was 1952 when General E. R. Wood, chairman of Sears Roebuck, struck a deak with Edgar Burton, president of Simpson’s, for joint ownership of the two companies’ catalogue and mail-order businesses. The U.S. five-and-dime chains were already here – Woolworth since 1919 and Kresge in 1928 – but the arrival of Sears changed retailing in Canada forever.

The first Simpsons-Sears store opened in Hamilton, Ont., in 1954, followed quickly by six more aimed directly at the market leader, Eaton’s. The Simpsons-Sears catalogue also took on Eaton’s with bigger books and better deals. By 1976 Eaton’s catalog was kaput. By 1999, Eatons was bankrupt and Sears bought nineteen of their stores, including the one in the flagship Eaton Centre. Just another irony in the fire.

Now Sears appears to be pulling out of all major locations across Canada. Last year, Sears closed in Vancouver, Calgary and Ottawa to make way for another U.S. chain, Nordstrom. The Canadian department stores are long gone: Simpsons, Woodwards, The Bay, Zeller’s and Eaton’s. Now we’ve got one U.S. outfit taking over from another. I guess that’s progress of a sort. Canadian ownership has become so thin on the ground that we don’t have anything left to sell.

Deja vu all over again

In the run-up to the 1972 federal election, when I was press secretary to then Opposition Leader Robert Stanfield, I wrote a research paper on the Pickering Airport proposed by the Trudeau Government. My conclusion: there was no need. More important, the majority of Torontonians didn’t want the airport. Yes, there was going to be a new airport built in Quebec, but Torontonians would not feel slighted if they didn’t get one, too.

During the election campaign, as Pickering Airport became an issue, Stanfield decided he wanted to hold a news conference on the topic. But what to say? The morning event was scheduled for the Sutton Place Hotel and I can remember returning from a political event the night before. As press secretary, I always travelled on the media bus, so I was pestered about what he’d be saying. Since not even Stanfield knew at that point, neither did I, so it was easy to remain mum.

A group gathered to draft Stanfield’s statement. They included speechwriters Bill Grogan and Dalton Camp, Research Director Geoff Molyneux, Finlay MacDonald, who ran the campaign, and me. Some drink was taken. Hours passed and we were no closer to having a statement than we were when we convened at 10 p.m. Finally, I think it was Dalton, came up with the phrase, “The case has not yet been made.”

Perfect. Stanfield was neither for nor against. It was up to the government to prove the necessity. The phrase was reminiscent of another expression Stanfield had used in becoming premier of Nova Scotia when he promised he would pave all roads that were “ready or near ready” for paving. Every voter on every gravel road assumed their byway was on the list even though no specific commitments were made.

Stanfield almost won the 1972 election. Pickering was only part of the unease people felt toward the Trudeau government, handing them a minority. Although the land was expropriated, the airport was never built. Anyone who has been through Pearson recently knows that there is plenty of capacity left. In all my comings and goings, I’ve never seen more than half of the dozen baggage carousels in use.

The Harper government is now talking about resuscitating the Pickering Airport. I think it’s safe to say that most Torontonians still don’t want a new airport east of Toronto. I say to the Harper Government as Robert Stanfield said more than 40 years ago: “The case has not yet been made.”

List and sell

While many magazines and other print journals are falling from the sky to their deaths like so many sparrows before the storm, one publication manages to carry on regardless of the economic headwinds facing the rest of its breed: Corporate Knights. Against all odds, the Summer issue just out is Volume 12, Issue 2. I presume that means it has been around for more than a decade which sounds about right in my memory, too.

With a healthy 74 pages, Corporate Knights calls itself The Magazine for Clean Capitalism. Who can be against that? One of the stories ranks Canada’s 50 top corporate citizens. Number one is Vancouver City Savings Credit Union, a touchy-feely financial services institution run mostly by women. Why, there’s even a list of 27 of Canada’s Best Foreign Corporations. You’ll recognize the names – from ArcelorMittal to Vale – the outfits that have bought up Canadian companies in part of the hollowing out process that’s been going on these last many years.

And there’s a piece about co-operatives, another squeaky clean form of capitalism, where again Corporate Knights ranks the possibilities and puts Co-operators Group atop a list of 10. There are more lists in this issue than a househusband trying to keep all his duties straight.

And of course, there’s the ritual piece on Richard Branson, down from his balloon or his space station long enough to talk about his latest plan called The B Team, a gathering of CEOs for whom financial gain flows from social and environmental gains.

I agree with all these left-wing, bleeding-heart goals, but I must say they make boring reading. I can’t imagine anybody plowing through these issues other than the PR staffers who fight to get their bosses or their companies into these pages so they can point out what a great job they’re doing at raising the corporate profile.

As you might expect, with such a benign editorial environment, there are lots of ads, twenty-four pages of them, a very nice ratio out of seventy-four pages in all. Oddly enough, one of the ads is from Co-operators (see above) saying how honoured they are to be a leader. A sizeable number of companies appearing on the 50 best list also just happen to have taken out full-page ads: TMX Group, Ontario Power Generation, Bullfrog Power, Telus, TD, BMO, Intact Financial, Catalyst Paper, Barrick Gold, Sun Life, and Enbridge. One of the ads actually shows a little girl hugging a tree.

Is it just possible that companies are told in advance they’re on the list and asked if they’d like to advertise? What a concept. As for readable editorial content, well, Corporate Knights is still working on that.

Liveable or laughable

My final 2013 property tax bill arrived today and was accompanied by a very interesting list that showed how our tax dollars are spent. The top four are predictable: police, fire, TTC and debt repayment. From the average homeowner who pays $2,532 (plus $1,005 in education tax) police services receive the most at $634.

The surprising thing to me was what was at the bottom of the list – city planning – which gets all of $9.58. Less than $10 per average householder goes annually to fund the people and the department that looks to the future. No wonder Toronto looks so ugly with cheapjack condos flooding the land west of the Rogers Centre, others blocking the view of the waterfront, and more being stuffed into every corner of all downtown intersections.

Anyone who’s been to Chicago knows what a big city waterfront can look like. Lake Shore Drive is a wonderful 30 km. long showcase of architecture and views. A couple of years ago Chicago announced a $4 billion plan to extend it south. All we’ve got is arguments about patching or dispatching the Gardiner Expressway. I’ve lived on the Toronto waterfront. It’s nothing to crow about, all cut off from the city.

People tell me the waterfront area east of Yonge is going to be different and certainly the Corus building is a good start. People also say Sugar Beach is terrific. To me, it’s a ridiculous, stranded sand bar with little to look at and no swimming.

It all proves you get what you pay for. There are no visionaries at City Hall and, if there were, my $10 a year along with yours isn’t going to bring about many new and compelling planning ideas.