Rod McQueen's Blog, page 61

The travesty of teardowns

There’s a house in Forest Hill that just sold for about $4 million. No one will live in it. The buyer plans to tear it down and build something even more grand. Imagine, $4 million for a teardown. That’s more than the average Joe will earn in a lifetime of schlepping to work every day.

Even in my far less fashionable neighborhood, teardowns are going for $750,000. In their place are being erected McMansions, oversized and out-place-monstrosities that all but block out the sun on the street. I fought one such proposal for more than two years through three sittings of the Committee of Adjustment. At the second hearing, the garage at the rear of the lot mysteriously disappeared from the submitted plans. Density was beyond the bylaws, but not enough to matter, said the committee. But the garage remained. The third hearing was all about maintaining the garage that had previously not existed on paper. Oops, said the developer. Despite the density being more than 25 per cent over what the bylaws allowed, the Committee of Adjustment approved. In his oral comments, the chairman said, “We’re here to give relief to the rules.”

There are more teardowns under way in my block. I didn’t protest any of them. Why waste time when the official approving agency pays more attention to protecting mature trees on the lot than preserving a neighbourhood of fine family homes.

Many of my neighbours don’t mind. They believe such activity raises the value of their own houses. Meanwhile, the area has become a construction zone. If I’d wanted such surroundings, I’d be living in tract housing. There’s more to life than seeing the value of your house increase. That’ll happen over time anyway. Meanwhile, what about serenity and quality of life. I place a value on that. Don’t you?

The tragedy of teardowns

There’s a house in Forest Hill that just sold for about $4 million. No one will live in it. The buyer plans to tear it down and build something even more grand. Imagine, $4 million for a teardown. That’s more than the average Joe will earn in a lifetime of schlepping to work every day.

Even in my far less fashionable neighborhood, teardowns are going for $750,000. In their place are being erected McMansions, oversized and out-place-monstrosities that all but block out the sun on the street. I fought one such proposal for more than two years through three sittings of the Committee of Adjustment. At the second hearing, the garage at the rear of the lot mysteriously disappeared from the submitted plans. Density was beyond the bylaws, but not enough to matter, said the committee. But the garage remained. The third hearing was all about maintaining the garage that had previously not existed on paper. Oops, said the developer. Despite the density being more than 25 per cent over what the bylaws allowed, the Committee of Adjustment approved. In his oral comments, the chairman said, “We’re here to give relief to the rules.”

There are more teardowns under way in my block. I didn’t protest any of them. Why waste time when the official approving agency pays more attention to protecting mature trees on the lot than preserving a neighbourhood of fine family homes.

Many of my neighbours don’t mind. They believe such activity raises the value of their own houses. Meanwhile, the area has become a construction zone. If I’d wanted such surroundings, I’d be living in tract housing. There’s more to life than seeing the value of your house increase. That’ll happen over time anyway. Meanwhile, what about serenity and quality of life. I place a value on that. Don’t you?

More Canada

My morning paper included a glossy 12-page ad supplement from Indigo. You know, the place that used to be a bookstore? Now, I like Indigo; they’ve sold a lot of my books. Plus they have more than half of the Canadian book market so attention must be paid. But Indigo is well on its way to becoming something else. In addition to the featured books, other advertised items include a vase, paperweight, tea pot and plates, sachets, honey, greeting cards, a scarf, and a tote bag.

I understand the business case. The items on the latter list have high profit margins. But so do books. Indigo makes more per book than either the publisher or the author. And, if a book doesn’t sell, Indigo can send it back to the publisher. Try doing that with a tote bag or a tea pot.

But while all of this might be irksome, to my mind what’s even worse is the selection of books offered in this Mother’s Day Gift Guide. Of the three dozen books shown, by my reckoning twenty of the authors are American. Second place goes to Britain with eight authors. France has two. All other countries, including Canada, are represented by one author. The lone Canadian book I could identify was Web of Angels by Lilian Nattel.

It wasn’t so long ago that Indigo played up its Canadian roots. The motto was “More Canada.” I’m happy sharing shelf space with sauces and saucers, but let’s not forget that there are thousands of books written by Canadian authors each year. Would it hurt to publicize more than one of them at a time?

Becoming a curmudgeon

Here are seven things that have been bothering me in recent days.

1. Remember Elwy Yost on TVOntario’s Saturday Night at the Movies? He was a bit geeky but three times out of four his movie choice was worth watching. He’s been replaced by a stream of hosts. I couldn’t even tell you the name of the current guy. The number of movies aired each week has doubled from two to four. That means about 130 movies since Labor Day of which I’ve watched maybe five. Who’s picking these duds?

2. The media in Canada is all too cosy. The Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail are now sharing a distribution system. Shaw, Rogers and CBC are sharing online ads. Compare that with the U.S where Amazon, Apple and Microsoft are battling for supremacy in e-book sales. Such flabby mediocrity is why we get less choice and pay higher prices. For everything.

3. My granddaughter wants to be a veterinarian so I took her Saturday to an open house at the Ontario Veterinary College in Guelph. The ads had photos that showed animals at all three locations. At the first stop we saw labs, a therapy pool, surgeries, a doggie daycare centre and digital x-ray equipment, but no animals. At the second location, there were three horses. My granddaughter fed one of them some straw only to have someone come along and post a sign saying, Do not feed the horses. At the third and final location, people leaving the building warned us off saying it contained only skeletons and was boring. What a lost opportunity for good public relations with the local community and future vets.

4. The Picasso exhibit that just opened at the Art Gallery of Ontario is spectacular and sure to be a summer blockbuster. Too bad every room has a guard with a walkie-talkie blaring inanities. Haven’t they heard of earbuds?

5. I don’t want an instore boutique Bloomingdales at The Bay. That’s like the tiny Tim Hortons at the Esso station. I want the full-blown department store. Despite our sanctimonious view of ourselves as a financially well-run country, we don’t have the demographics for U.S. retailers except for low enders like Walmart and Lowe’s.

6. It doesn’t matter what time of day I tune in CBC Radio Two, the music is hopeless, the chatter vapid. The ratings must be awful.

7. What urban planner approved the spate of condos along the Gardiner Expressway that block the view of the Toronto skyline? One pair of buildings under construction is so close to the highway that you could do a drive-by handshake with residents. And there’s no neighbourhood. Living there would make a stone sick.

Florence Mary Eaton McEachren 1919-2012

There are many whose deaths signal the end of an era but none so much as Florence Mary McEachren (nee Eaton) who died this week. Florence was the last of the children of Sir John and Lady Eaton. Sir John was the merchant prince of Eaton’s, the son of Timothy, founder of that great institution. Sir John died in 1922, when Florence was just a toddler. Lady Eaton carried on as the family’s public face for almost 50 years before dying in 1970.

Florence lived a life of privilege of the sort that no longer exists. Her mother adopted an English child, Evlyn, so Florence would have company. The two attended finishing schools in England and Italy, were presented at the court of King George and Queen Elizabeth in 1938, and regularly sojourned to Cannes and Fiesole accompanied by a chauffer and a Rolls-Royce shipped to Europe for their conveyance.

Despite an upbringing that should have created a spoiled brat, Florence grew into a wise, witty and independent woman whom everyone admired. During the Second World War, she tried to enlist but in those days women needed their husband’s permission and Frank McEachren refused. So Florence signed on as a volunteer truck driver for the Canadian Red Cross and served her country at home.

There were those who said Florence was brighter than any of her four brothers and should have run Eaton’s. Sir John’s will said she could be president, but only if no brother was able. John David Eaton was eventually designated and she told me she was not unhappy with the choice. She was not, however, pleased with what occurred during the sad regime of John David’s four sons, John Craig, Fred, Thor and George when Eaton’s went bankrupt.

When I interviewed Florence in 1997 while researching my book, The Eatons, she talked first about John David’s brothers, saying, “The others didn’t have the talent.” She then continued on to talk about the trouble the modern-day Eaton’s had gotten into by saying, “You need a certain talent; look what’s happening now.”

Florence was also able to see the lighter side of life. When I asked about John David’s propensity for drink, she talked about the family’s pleasure in fast cars and fast times. “We’ve all got gasoline in our veins. And alcohol.”

I won’t attend the memorial service next month. The family doesn’t like me much and no one deserves such a person around on an occasion like that. But I’ll be celebrating Florence’s life in my own way and wondering what would have become of Eaton’s if she and her progeny had taken charge.

Why RIM went blooey (Part two)

Here’s the continuation of the dozen reasons why I think Research In Motion is in trouble:

• Seven: Too few at the top. For most of the last ten years, upper management at RIM remained  little changed. I admire a lean machine but as the company grew from a bit player to a Goliath, more talent at the top would have been helpful … particularly in marketing. They hired an outsider but he didn’t last. Jim took over the job despite the fact that he already had plenty on his plate.

• Eight: Too many outside interests. I greatly admire and respect Mike and Jim’s mid-life philanthropy but it’s possible they were distracted by their various think tanks, university projects, and other ventures that did not come to fruition. There’s a reason why most businesspeople don’t become philanthropists until later in life.

• Nine: Apps are crucial. An app might turn your smartphone into a flashlight or find a good restaurant in a new neighbourhood. Outside developers don’t care about RIM and they don’t invent apps for the BlackBerry so BlackBerry has far too few, maybe 15,000–25,000 compared to iPhone’s 500,000. No one could possibly use, let alone need, 500,000 apps, but the choice is there and BlackBerry suffers by comparison.

• Ten: RIM’s culture has always been a developer culture. The people who wrote the code were the only ones that mattered. That’s all well and good when you’re the market leader, but when you’re battling for market share, you better have a marketing culture. That was Steve Job’s forte. He knew what people wanted before they even knew what they wanted. Except for the Torch, which was not a great success, RIM stuck with the keyboard and assumed that was the only game in town. They were wrong.

• Eleven: RIM’s acquisition of QNX in April 2010, the company that’s developing the software for the BlackBerry 10, was a mistake for a variety of reasons. First, it sent a message to all of RIM’s developers that said: You and whatever you’re working on is not the future, it’s the past. So much for the developer culture. Second, an inordinate amount of time and effort was spent producing a dud, the PlayBook, launched a year ago, the first RIM product with QNX software. Even though it was a failure, RIM stuck with it and recently issued an update rather than focus on getting new smartphone models out the door fast.

• Twelve: the long time between product launches. The 9900 came out last August (with the old software, not the QNX version) but the BB 10 with QNX won’t be out until this fall. That’s more than a year, way too long to wait. Moreover, the 9900 has quality problems. People I know who bought that model say it resets on its own once a week. RIM’s reliability has never before been an issue. The three-day global outage last fall further reduced client confidence.

Why RIM went blooey (Part one)

In May 2010, I went to Washington, D.C. as part of the U.S. book launch and had lunch with two friends who live there. One of them arrived at the restaurant excitedly holding a new iPhone and she would not stop talking about it. Right then, I knew BlackBerry was in trouble. I’d read about the lineups at release dates, but this was my first encounter with a devotee. I thought to myself, I published that book about BlackBerry just in the nick of time. Since then, it’s been all down hill for Research In Motion (RIM). At the peak, Jim Balsillie was personally worth $3.4 billion and Mike Lazaridis about $3.6 billion. Their net worth is now $385 million and $408 million respectively. That’s still a lot of money, but how would you like to lose 90 per cent of your net worth?

• Reason number one, more competition. Three years ago, BlackBerry dominated the smartphone market in the U.S. and is now a distant third with a 16 per cent market share far behind Android with 47 per cent and iPhone with 30 per cent. RIM can talk all it likes about Indonesia or Nigeria or Latin America but those markets are mostly low-end phones with slim margins. The market that really matters is the U.S. I was in Arizona in February, pulled out my BlackBerry, and the man next to me said, “You must be the last man in America with a BlackBerry.” When people talk like that, the buzz has gone and the buzzsaw has begun.

• Two. Founder Syndrome. Jim was not in fact a founder, the unheralded Doug Fregin actually co-founded RIM with Mike in 1984, but when Jim joined in 1992, RIM had only fourteen employees compared to 15,000 today. Mike and Jim succeeded for so long they thought they would always succeed and didn’t need to listen to what users were saying or what the market was telling them.

• Three. RIM proudly points to their 75 million subscribers and notes that each of those people brings in money every month from the carriers who share what they get with RIM. Right now, that’s about $5 a month. Excellent cash flow. But it used to be $15 … and it will continue to shrink.

• Four: It’s not unusual for tech companies to rise and fall. Nortel is another homegrown example. In the 1990s, everybody had a Palm Pilot. Today, nobody’s heard of it. Yahoo used to be everybody’s favorite but has lost its way. In the last five years they’ve had four CEOs. AOL just sold 800 patents to Microsoft for $1.1 billion because they’re under attack and need the money.

• Five: Jim and Mike were co-CEOs starting in 1993 until they recently stepped down. For a long time, being co-CEOs worked and then it didn’t work. In a story in the current issue of Toronto Life, writer Andrea Mandel-Campbell claims the split began at the time of the stock options backdating fiasco in 2007. She does not cite a specific source, saying Mike was angry to have been roped into that. He felt Jim should have had his back. The Toronto Life story may be right … but I have my doubts. I saw both Mike and Jim many times after that problem and noticed no particular strains between them. Still, there is no question they built separate internal empires and grew further apart. The strengths they drew from each other slowly dissipated. After a while, one plus one no longer equalled three.

• Six: Succeeding in global markets is not for the faint of heart. When I was researching my book I thought the people at RIM were tough enough. I was wrong. Look at Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook. He just paid $1 billion for Instagram, a company with twelve employees. He wanted their location data – it was like one newspaper buying the subscriber list of another newspaper – but he also feared Instagram’s potential rivalry. Zuckerberg’s actions reminded me of another successful tech entrepreneur, Andy Grove, of Intel. When Grove wrote his memoirs, the title was “Only the Paranoid Survive.” Mike and Jim were insufficiently paranoid. They thought they would go unchallenged forever.

To be continued ….

The loneliness of the short distance leader

The TV ads, paid for by the Conservative Party, attacking interim Liberal Leader Bob Rae are devastating. “He couldn’t run a province. He can’t run Canada” goes the tagline along with a voiceover about the deficit he created. The words are rough enough, but what really impales Rae is his own laughtrack, a “heh-heh-heh-heh” that sounds smug and uncaring. In the background is some music that reminds me of the Three Stooges.

I like Bob Rae, but I don’t think he should run for Liberal leader. By the time the next election occurs, he will be 67. The country needs the next generation to step up. Rae has said he won’t run for leader, but who knows? I never understood why he was drawn back to the federal flame after being an MP thirty years ago. He was on his way to becoming an elder statesman by taking on important tasks such as the Air India inquiry and the study on education for the Dalton McGuinty government.

Moreover, if I were a donor to the Conservative Party, which I am not, I’d question the use of party funds for such a purpose. First, Rae may not even be the man Stephen Harper will be up against. Second, isn’t politics a more noble cause than this?

For my money, the next leader of the Liberal Party should be Dominic LeBlanc, the bilingual MP from New Brunswick. He has politics in his bones (father Romeo was an aide to Pierre Trudeau, a cabinet minister, senator and governor-general) so he knows the promise and pitfalls of politics. And so far, he hasn’t made a misstep. At that rate, he won’t attract attack ads. I, for one, wouldn’t miss them.

The future ain’t what it used to be

I heard Anna Porter deliver a delightful talk last night at McMaster University about her career in Canadian publishing and the future of the book. Unfortunately, the past looks better than what’s coming next.

Porter was a co-founder of Key Porter Books, one of Canada’s great houses. She sold her interest in 2004 and the company has since gone bust, as have several other former major players. An author of six books herself, most recently the award-winning The Ghosts of Europe, Porter is uniquely qualified to talk about publishing. Of all the publishers I’ve ever worked with, she was unique. Most publishers are order-takers. Not Porter. She was forever brimming with ideas and putting them together with people.

Porter started in the business in the 1970s working for Jack McClelland, the man who singlehandedly invented modern publishing and the promotion of authors in Canada. She approvingly quoted him as saying, “This terrible business has been kind to me.” Porter worked with all the greats: Margaret Atwood, Farley Mowat, Irving Layton, and Al Purdy. For her, Margaret Laurence is Canada’s best writer and The Stone Angel her best novel.

Canada has 139 publishers but less than 200 bookstores. Porter worries about the direction Indigo is taking by reducing books in favor of other consumer items. But she quoted independent bookstore owner Ben McNally as saying that fewer books at Indigo might actually be good for his business. Publishing still employs 7,500 creating 15,000 books a year in Canada. Tens of thousands of additional titles pour into Canada from other lands where they spill more than we drink.

The future of the book is unclear. Online books are now a $1 billion annual business but the only ones making money are Amazon and their ilk. Publishers and writers do not share fairly in the profits. Much of the fault lies with the publishers; like the tribal clans of Scotland they fight each either rather than unite to limit the common enemy.

Porter remains an optimist. No surprise there. To not only survive for forty years in the business, but also prosper, you have to be optimistic. And you have to be good. Anna Porter was among the best. If we had a few more go-getters like her in the field today, I’d be more sanguine about the future.

Seven mysteries of life

1. Why whenever a plane crashes is there always so much earnest blather about finding the flight recorder when the resulting information won't be available for months?

2. Why did Stephen Harper run for office, finally win a majority, and then show no particular vision of the country as a whole place in the recent budget?

3. Why are Canadians so introverted? Yesterday I came upon a lineup of maybe fifty people outside my local fish and chip store. I asked those at the head of the line, "What's happening? Are they giving it away?" No one said anything. Not a word. I might just as well have been a street person begging for a handout. Fortunately, an employee I know stuck her head out the door to check on the line, and explained this was a Good Friday ritual. If I'd asked a similar line-up anywhere in the United States I would have heard half a dozen tales about this family tradition that went back for years. I used to blame the weather for freezing our national psyche, but this past winter was sultry by comparison to some. I guess we're just tight-assed for no good reason.

4. The Middle East. The people who have tried to solve the Israel-Palestinian problem have been as numerous as they are intelligent and yet we are no closer to an answer.

5. Canadians forgive Bill Clinton for his foibles by welcoming him with praise and applause whenever he ventures north of the border. Yet at the same time they refuse redemption for another politician of the same vintage, Brian Mulroney.

6. Why was Luck cancelled and Smash renewed? How low is the bar for intelligence in television? (I think I know the answer to this one.)

7 How can gas prices jump four cents overnight everywhere at once?