Rod McQueen's Blog, page 59

Saved by the Bell

Cogeco Cable, Eastlink and Quebecor Inc. are complaining about Bell Canada’s planned purchase of Astral Media. In full-page ads appearing in yesterday’s paper they claimed that, if approved, Bell’s TV viewing audience (they already own HBO Canada, The Movie Network, and Family among others) will be twice as large as the nearest competitor.

Is the ginger group saying this is unfair? A monoply? If so, that’s a strange allegation given that the complainers have community cable licences that could also be called monopolies since any consumer on any given street who wants cable TV can only buy from the one authorized company. But maybe I’m missing a nuance.

Let me tell you why I’m happy with Bell, suppliers of my home phone and Internet services, and think they should be allowed to expand. Bell is in the process of changing paper bills to e-bills but when my first emailed notice arrived recently, the link provided couldn’t yield my e-bill. I called and a very helpful Bell operator cleared away the debris and I was able to see my bill.

Then she said, “Let’s take a look at your services.” I thought, here we go, she’ll try and sell me something. In fact, the agent looked at my phone bill and found a new package with all the features I previously had, but at a lower cost. She then checked my Internet, and not only cut fees, but also suggested a higher-speed version for a one-time modem charge of $49.95, half the usual price, and no more monthly modem fee. My total monthly savings for phone and Internet will be about $20 or $240 annually. When was the last time you heard such good news from a provider of anything? I didn’t get her name, but her Agent ID is EX42623.

A technician was required to install the new modem. Simon (I did get his name) arrived as scheduled this morning and spent most of his 90-minute visit up the pole two doors away trying to find a line that can handle the higher speed. There seemed to be none available. He has turned the matter over to his Bell cable colleagues who I’m sure will be able solve the problem. Meanwhile, after my experience, I’d be happy if Bell ran the entire world, not just Astral Media.

(Disclosure: I hold BCE Inc., Bell’s parent company, in my RSP.)

Zip your lip

The sight of Boris Johnson, Lord Mayor of London, stranded on a zip line yesterday did my heart good, I have to admit. He was inert, dangling, and could do no harm high above the ground.

My real beef with Johnson is not that he’s a clown, on par with Rob Ford, but that he wrote a book last year in which he purports to be an expert on everything. Called Johnson’s Life of London, the book traces that city’s history through a personally skewed list that includes Geoffrey Chaucer but not Charles Dickens.

His efforts at interviewing people for the book are laughable. For a long while, Johnson stalked Keith Richards without success. Finally, he heard that Keef was to be at an event honouring his own book, Life, ghosted by James Fox. As an aside, I must say that Fox, who wrote the excellent White Mischief, managed to capture Keef’s voice perfectly. It’s just that after 150 pages or so, I didn’t want to hear it any more and couldn’t push all the way through the 500-plus pages.

But I digress. When Johnson finally meets Keef, Keef is pleasant enough but I can’t believe he thought Johnson was conducting an interview. It sounded just like party talk to me. But here’s what really irks me about the mayor. His thesis is that The Rolling Stones and The Beatles took the blues from America, turned that genre into rock ‘n’ roll and exported it to the New World.

What a load of codswallop. The Stones formed in 1962; the Beatles played Shea Stadium in 1965. Is Boris trying to say there was no rock ‘n’ roll before that? What about Elvis Presley who was singing Hound Dog in 1956. Or Little Richard’s Tutti Frutti in 1955? And other 1950s stars like Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins, The Coasters, Buddy Holly, Duane Eddy and Bo Diddley. And, of course, Jerry Lee Lewis. Surely, Boris must remember The Killer showing up in London in May 1958 with his wife, Myra, who was thirteen and also his first cousin. The visit caused such a stir I heard all about it in far-off Guelph the next day. My point is that rock ‘n’ roll existed long before the Stones got rolling. By 1958 The Killer already had two hits, Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On and Great Balls of Fire, as well as a movie, High School Confidential. What Boris wrote is nothing more than classic British condescension toward the former colonies.

I don’t know anything about being a mayor, but non-fiction books should contain facts and not present conversations as in-depth research. I’ll make a deal with Boris. I won’t run for mayor in my lifetime; he doesn’t write any more books.

A word about words

Christopher Plummer’s one-man show at Stratford is almost a tour de force. A Word or Two is Plummer’s paean to poetry, prose and a lifetime of reading that began when he was just a tad in a home where everyone gathered after dinner to read aloud. The launch pad for him was Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, specifically an illustration in the book of “an aged man a-sitting on a gate” whose visage and lyrical poem beckoned Plummer to enter into other worlds through words.

Plummer, winner of an Oscar earlier this year at 82, was suitably self-deprecating. “I was an only child, so I was often left on my own. Can you blame them?” But he is also the smart-assed ne’er-do-well. When asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, he always answered, “An orphan.” Throughout the performance, which runs about ninety minutes without an intermission, he played on those two sides of his character: the delight and the demon.

The set is simple: three chairs, a lecturn, a desk, and a swooping pile of books in the shape of curved staircase. He rarely refers to a text while delivering, among other favourites, great swaths of Shaw’s Man and Superman, a biblical passage, Robert Frost’s poem about swinging on birches, and a Shakespearean monologue.

Plummer also goes for the easy laugh. Every once in a while he dapples in a well-worn phrase such as “A gentleman is someone who knows how to play the bagpipes, but doesn’t.” Such lines tickle the audience but they seem somehow out of place. He is also still tinkering with the show, which is now in previews and officially opens Thursday. For example, he did a W. H. Auden poem using a southern accent, which was odd given the fact that Auden was born in Birmingham, read English at Oxford, lived for a while in New York, and died in Vienna. Even Plummer seemed to realize he was in trouble, finally asking aloud, “Why am I doing this in a southern accent?”

But to have memorized so much at his age – or any age – is a wonder to behold and melodious to hear. Still, as my daughter Alison pointed out, Plummer mentioned Gertrude Stein in passing but the only female whose words ’scaped his lips was the American poet Emily Dickinson. The canon was thoroughly masculine. As for Canadian writers, Marshall McLuhan was cited, but I can’t recall anyone actually quoted.

I also found the ending less than satisfactory. During the usual standing ovation Plummer graciously took his bows, exited stage right, and was gone. There was no encore. The show was suddenly over. It was all too abrupt from the warm bath of words to the cold shower of silence. I would have liked a final flourish of trumpets, maybe Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night by Dylan Thomas, or some other lilting verse to turn over on my tongue on the way home.

Just asking

1. What is it with this summer’s newest and most awful skirt style where the front is above the knees and the back trails like a train with a round bottom (the skirt, not the wearer, madam). Call it the skirt that couldn’t make up its mind.

2. Am I a schnook or is the La Senza ad that promotes brassieres with the slogan “Push it up real good” not just poor grammar but also poor taste?

3. Speaking of silly ads, what about the one for the new Visa Debit card – there’s an oxymoron right up there with jumbo shrimp and military intelligence. The one where different city names have debit stuffed into the middle, like Philadebitphia and SanFrandebitsco. The worst is WashingtonDebitC. Whenever I see these wacked-out names, all I can think of is people going into hock which isn’t supposed to be what these cards are all about.

4. How does General Motors spend $750 million on research and development in Canada over the next five years and not manage to create a single new job? Doesn’t someone at least have to build the facilities, clean them, run the experiments or deliver courier packages?

5. And what about the Ontario and Canadian governments? How can they stand there with straight faces and say that this expenditure in any way fulfils the terms of the billions in bailout dollars lavished on those free enterprisers, the automotive sector?

Just asking.

The power of money

Just how venal can banks get? In the last two months HSBC got caught laundering money, Barclays fiddled with LIBOR, Goldman Sachs settled a $600-million class action suit on mortgage-backed securities, the London Whale lost billions for JP Morgan, and Wells Fargo did predatory lending. Whatever happened to 3-6-3? That was when bankers paid depositors 3 percent, charged borrowers 6 per cent, and were on the golf course by 3 p.m.

The first thing that happened was Bill Clinton ended Glass-Steagall, the 1930s legislation that kept commercial banks and securities firms separate. The second thing that happened was compensation got way out of whack. When the Ontario Securities Commission first forced corporations to reveal salaries, Scotiabank CEO Peter Godsoe was the worst-paid leader at the Big Five Banks with an annual salary of something like $600,000 a year. As a joke, Brascan’s Trevor Eyton passed the hat at a party to collect what he called Peter’s Pence to help out. Now a bank CEO can earn $600,000 every two weeks.

While some CEOs might be worth that much, too many people down the line, and way too many traders who are out of line can make as much in a month as most people earn in lifetime. Such fabulous sums have twisted capitalism far beyond what the robber barons of the Golden Age ever imagined. In that era, a few people got wildly wealthy on the backs of the workers. These days, too many people can make enough money in a few years to retire, leaving the system reeling and investors with no part of the pie.

There’s a parallel in all this with what’s happening as Toronto gangs trade gunfire that not only kills their intended victim but causes collateral damage to innocent bystanders. While politicians and police chiefs call for more patrols and social programs, the real problem may be intractable: absent fathers. When there is no supervision, kids do whatever they want.

The same problem exists in banking. When regulators don’t prosecute individuals, there are no consequences for corrupt behavior. I don’t know how to fix broken homes and battleground neighbourhoods, but banking could be made better by putting into law the Volcker Rule against speculative activity. It won’t guarantee downtrodden investors aren’t the only ones to suffer ever again, but it would be a good place to start.

Lament for a nation

I’ve loved lists ever since CHUM (1050 on your dial) produced its first top 50 chart in 1957 with All Shook Up by Elvis Presley at number one. Two corporate lists have recently come to hand: the ROB top 1000 and the Fortune Global 500.

Atop the charts in the ROB, measured by profit, is Toronto-Dominion Bank at $5.9 billion. Everybody agrees that TD CEO Ed Clark has done a stellar job. His unusual background includes time as a civil servant followed by a series of roles at Merrill Lynch and Canada Trust where the watchword was FIFO (Fit in or F**k Off). He not only fit in, he became president of the merged entity when TD acquired CT Financial Services.

The unusual method of picking a successor has made him a wealthy man. Clark’s annual compensation has ranged between $9 million and $19 million during the last nine years. He has two pensions, one from TD and another from Canada Trust, for a total of $2.5 million a year. His combined pension, which will kick in when he retires as early as next year at 65, was frozen in 2010 in return for a whack of options worth $4.7 million. I have no problem with any of that. He made a lot of shareholders wealthier than they otherwise would have been.

Where I do have a problem is evident on the Fortune list. By my count, Canada has a piddling eleven companies among the top 500. The Netherlands, which is about half the size of New Brunswick, has more. Even Australia, which compared to Canada is geographically deprived of markets, has only two fewer than Canada.

We are not a nation of strivers. Take auto parts as just one example. Canadian auto parts firms have had a leg up since the 1965 Auto Pact. Duty-free access to the huge American market should have meant the creation of many global giants. Instead there are only two: Magna and Linamar. Both were founded by a young, immigrant tool-and-die maker. In the case of Magna, Austria’s Frank Stronach; at Linamar, Frank Hasenfratz from Hungary.

Most Canadian CEOs would rather sell out than succeed. And so we have seen great Canadian companies disappear in steel (Stelco and Dofasco), beer (Molson and Labatt), mining (Falconbridge and Inco), well, you know the long, sad list.

I can only hope that among the 225,000 immigrants coming to Canada annually there are a few entrepreneurs with vision and vigour. Because we sure don’t seem to produce many business leaders on our own. I keep reading about thought leadership, whatever the heck that is. We need action leadership.

Listing to port

I’ve loved lists ever since CHUM (1050 on your dial) produced its first top 50 chart in 1957 with All Shook Up by Elvis Presley at number one. Two corporate lists have recently come to hand: the ROB top 1000 and the Fortune Global 500.

Atop the charts in the ROB, measured by profit, is Toronto-Dominion Bank at $5.9 billion. Everybody agrees that TD CEO Ed Clark has done a stellar job. His unusual background includes time as a civil servant followed by a series of roles at Merrill Lynch and Canada Trust where the watchword was FIFO (Fit in or F**k Off). He not only fit in, he became president of the merged entity when TD acquired CT Financial Services.

The unusual method of picking a successor has made him a wealthy man. Clark’s annual compensation has ranged between $9 million and $19 million during the last nine years. He has two pensions, one from TD and another from Canada Trust, for a total of $2.5 million a year. His combined pension, which will kick in when he retires as early as next year at 65, was frozen in 2010 in return for a whack of options worth $4.7 million. I have no problem with any of that. He made a lot of shareholders wealthier than they otherwise would have been.

Where I do have a problem is evident on the Fortune list. By my count, Canada has a piddling eleven companies among the top 500. The Netherlands, which is about half the size of New Brunswick, has more. Even Australia, which compared to Canada is geographically deprived of markets, has only two fewer than Canada.

We are not a nation of strivers. Take auto parts as just one example. Canadian auto parts firms have had a leg up since the 1965 Auto Pact. Duty-free access to the huge American market should have meant the creation of many global giants. Instead there are only two: Magna and Linamar. Both were founded by a young, immigrant tool-and-die maker. In the case of Magna, Austria’s Frank Stronach; at Linamar, Frank Hasenfratz from Hungary.

Most Canadian CEOs would rather sell out than succeed. And so we have seen great Canadian companies disappear in steel (Stelco and Dofasco), beer (Molson and Labatt), mining (Falconbridge and Inco), well, you know the long, sad list.

I can only hope that among the 225,000 immigrants coming to Canada annually there are a few entrepreneurs with vision and vigour. Because we sure don’t seem to produce many business leaders on our own. I keep reading about thought leadership, whatever the heck that is. We need action leadership.

Jammin’ with Pearl Jam

At the Pearl Jam concert at O2 World in Berlin last Wednesday, the audience came from far and wide. There were flags from Italy and Denmark. There were overheard accents from America and Scotland. Two couples with a total of five children under five had outfitted everyone in tshirts calling themselves the Traveling Poles.

For vocalist Eddie Vedder and the other four members of the rock band formed in Seattle in 1990, this was their 998th concert. “It seems like more,” said Eddie, who twice urged those on the floor to take three steps back to stop crowding at the front. They complied, then threw themselves back into the fray with raised arms, singing along as if they’d written the lyrics themselves.

Pearl Jam did 28 numbers including two encores in the two-and-a-half hour show. The signature sign-off, Rockin’ in the Free World, was followed by Indifference, with Ray Cameron, son of drummer Matt Cameron, on guitar. A young daughter of guitarist Mike McCready could be seen whirling and dancing beside the stage in the early going. Mike also brought his mother on stage to announce that it was her birthday. We all sang Happy Birthday to Louise. Pearl Jam is a family affair.

The couple next to us from Hamburg might have been in their fifties, but I think I am safe in saying that I was among the oldest at the concert attended by about 15,000 rabid fans. Most were in their 30s and 40s. Beer was well priced at two euros plus two euros for the refundable plastic glass – less than half what vendors charge at the Rogers Centre.

In conjunction with I Believe in Miracles, a Ramones cover, Eddie said he’d visited the Ramones museum in Berlin that afternoon and urged the crowd to do the same. We went the next day. For euros 3.50 you get a Ramones button and a lifetime membership. For 5 euros, you get a button, the lifetime deal, and a beer. We took the latter option. The museum, run by a couple, includes photos, paraphernalia, jeans worn by Joey Ramone, and a host of other items all displayed under screens playing Ramones concerts from the 1980s.

At the museum Mark recognized Matt Cameron and his son who had come by to pay their respects to the original punk rockers. Ray, who might be fourteen, has been to fifty Pearl Jam concerts on several continents. For Mark, an inveterate Pearl Jam fan who attended the back-to-back concerts at O2 World (as a novice, I just went to one) the encounter and conversation with the Camerons was a trip highlight.

As Pearl Jam’s newest fan among the millions, I’ll be back for more.

Ich bin ein Berliner

Just back from a whirlwind trip to Berlin. The reason was son Mark’s desire to see a Pearl Jam concert (about which more later). I got to tag along for the event but we also fitted in a six-hour guided walking tour, visits to five museums and galleries, several excellent meals and a few Pilsners over four days.

I had naively thought that the Berlin Wall was some short barricade with Checkpoint Charlie in the middle. In fact, it ran 143 kilometres with a parallel wall the better to see escapees. And flee they did, by tunnel and zipline. In many places portions of the wall remain as a reminder of the attempts by regimes to keep citizens in line and others out. Today Checkpoint Charlie is fake; for a two euro fee you can have your picture taken with two bored warriors.

A more compelling sight was the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. The city-block sized sculpture contains some 2,700 concrete slabs that range from coffin-sized rectangles at the edges to fifteen-foot tall plinths in the middle where the sunken cobble-stone walkways lie well below street level. There’s no sign and no names, just an eerie feeling as you tread further and further into the maze while your former surroundings disappear from sight.

The memorial is not the only public admission of communal guilt. Elsewhere, a series of panels details the rise and fall of Hitler in all his evil. There are also small bronze plaques being installed on the sidewalks outside the houses of Jews who were deported, never to be seen again.

Behind the contemporary architecture and restored buildings still showing artillery damage, however, there is modern-day trouble. When the Berlin Wall was erected after the war, big German companies such as Seimens and AEG moved elsewhere. When the wall fell in 1989, they did not come back. Unemployment in the city is 13 per cent, almost twice the national rate.

But Berlin is also a lively, dynamic place that looks forward as well as back. It was Fashion Week so the city was abuzz with models and makeup artists. And there was always a motorcade speeding by with some politician, hat in hand, calling on Chancellor Angela Merkel. Ironic, isn’t it, when the loser becomes the leader.

St. James redux

Last November I wrote a blog about Occupy Toronto. In it I said I agreed with much of what they preached – until I visited their site in St. James Park. What I saw was deplorable: ruts in the grass, broken tree branches, a defaced bandstand and a general carelessness for public property that bordered on contempt.

My support evaporated immediately. I declared they should decamp. The park couldn’t withstand any more such protests. The next day police moved in and evicted the squatters.

I recently returned to the scene. I needn’t have been so distressed; there was no sign of lasting damage. Perennials such as lady’s mantle and lavender look as lovely as ever. The city has planted impatiens in the usual places. House sparrows bathe in the fountain. Dog walkers form conversational bouquets. The trees have recovered from those sleeping platforms. The repainted bandstand welcomes the same homeless crew as before. The only bit of detritus I saw was a Budweiser tallboy can in a flower border but since it was emblazoned with a Blue Jays motif I had to assume it was of more recent vintage.

I was wrong to worry. As a friend used to say to me, “Most of the tragedies in my life never happened.”