Yearly Archive: 2012

Joey Slinger, long-time columnist at the Toronto Star and winner of the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour Writing, has been pummelling me with messages ever since my recent post about Guelph. Slinger also grew up in Guelph where he rose to the rank of sergeant-major in the cadet corps at Guelph Collegiate Vocational Institute. I was just a lowly private. Both of us wrote for the Guelph Mercury. He was full-time. I was merely a weekly high school news columnist while I was a student. So you can see he was always one step ahead. Slinger took umbrage at...

My opinion about Stephen Harper began to shift last March. I met him for the first time when he was in Toronto for the official sod-turning of the tunnel to Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport. Unlike his cold and stand-offish public image, the Prime Minister was warm, gracious, and relaxed. My two grandchildren were also present. With a smile, he said to each of them, “Shake my hand, look me in the eye, and tell me your name.” He took time to chat even though the official ceremony awaited. Last month during a lengthy Q&A session at the Canadian American...

My co-author, Susan Papp, and I attended a reading and book signing today at The Bookshelf, a wonderful bookstore in Guelph. Susan and I each read passages, we did a short Q&A with Frank Hasenfratz, the subject of our book, Driven To Succeed, and then Frank answered questions from the 75 or so people on hand. Barb and Doug Minett, owners of The Bookshelf, have done a terrific job in a difficult industry. Their establishment – which also offers first-run movies and has an excellent cafe – is among the best independent bookstores in Canada. For Susan and I, the event served as...

I have seen the new BB10 from BlackBerry and it is both sleek and slick. I viewed the touchscreen version and can report that the keys are bigger than the keys on either the iPhone or Android smartphones in the hopes that businesspeople will find the larger size helpful and won’t flee elsewhere. Overall, it looks and behaves like the PlayBook. No surprise there, the two devices share the same software. The audio and the video both work well. There are only two issues. One is that old bugbear, the developer community is slow to produce apps. Second, when exactly is...

The design problem with the new Four Seasons Hotel in Yorkville is obvious right from the forecourt. In the middle is a four-tiered fountain that could come from the Renaissance, the pad uses a mosaic of stone inspired by a Persian rug, and the glass canopy over the entrance has a floral pattern reminiscent of a nineteenth-century textile by William Morris. It’s as if they weren’t sure what to do so they did everything. The hodge-podge continues inside. A minuscule hotel lobby that could seat a dozen gives onto a room containing only a sculptural dandelion. The front desk is...

There’s that number again, 21.7 percent. According to a study by The Council of Canadian Academies, women represent one-third of all full-time faculty, but only 21.7 percent of full professors. I say there’s that number again because if you look at other sectors such as financial services, law, and accounting the proportion of women in executive positions or partner roles is usually about 22 percent and has been for some time. On boards of directors, the share is even lower, about 11 percent, with no progress in recent years. Whenever I see a half-page advertisement for a law firm or...

Yesterday I spoke to a class of eager young business students at the Ted Rogers School of Management at Ryerson University. They’ve been reading my BlackBerry book under the guidance of Professor Knut Jensen who issued the invitation for me to tell his class why Research In Motion started its sad downward slide right after the book came out in March 2010. Readers of my blog will be familiar with my thesis but I had a few new thoughts worth sharing. I told them I was dubious about RIM’s future and not at all convinced that the new BB 10,...

Frank Stronach’s plans to run for office in Austria sound familiar to me. In 1987 he hired me to write a book about his life that would also contain policy ideas for Canada. The story of his business career creating Magna was inspiring but his policy platform was a tad thin. The book was never published. Frank would have loved to be prime minister, particularly if he could somehow just be appointed to the job, but he was willing to go through the democratic process. He ran as a Liberal for Parliament in 1988 in York-Simcoe and finished second, about 7,000 votes...

A story in today’s New York Times has set me pondering about pandering. On page one of the Sunday Styles section – the one with street fashion photos, society weddings, fundraisers for elites, and coverage of Kate Moss – there’s a story about Canada. The thesis is that left-leaning Americans will flock to live in Canada if Mitt Romney wins on Tuesday. But wait, there are no actual Americans saying they will move to Canada, there aren’t even any Americans commenting on who or how many might move to Canada. What writer John Ortved has done is contact a dozen...

The announcement today that Random House and Penguin Books will merge is another sad step in the downward spiral of a business already in disarray. The press release was full of cheerful wording about how writers will benefit from the new arrangement. Indeed, individual relationships may continue but important aspects like advances will suffer since the two are unlikely to bid against each other for a work they want. With famous Canadian houses such as McClelland & Stewart, Stoddart, Key Porter and Douglas & McIntyre merged or bankrupt, fewer players in publishing is not good. Perhaps it no longer matters....

When I arrived in Ottawa in 1970 as a young, green press secretary to Robert Stanfield, there were a few MPs who took me under their wing. Lincoln Alexander was one of them. I met a lot of politicians then, and more in the years since, but it’s safe to say that Linc was the only one I ever knew who had no enemies. None. Stanfield’s followers were not always loyal to their leader. Nor did Pierre Trudeau help Stanfield’s cause when he placed before the House a resolution confirming bilingualism, even though the policy had previously been approved. As...

My five-year-old grandson recently announced that he didn’t like SpongeBob SquarePants. I always found him a bit grating too, but rather than agree, I asked why? Without hesitation he said, “Some people like some things and other people like other things.” Maybe that insight applies to all ages and explains why I like some people and not others. Take Salman Rushdie, for example. Now that he has turned his murderous fatwa into a novel, Joseph Anton, he has become inescapable. Not to wish another period of danger upon him, but I liked him better when he was in hiding. Then...

I spent yesterday with Frank Hasenfratz, founder and chairman of Linamar Corp. He is the subject of a new book called Driven to Succeed (Dundurn) written by Susan M. Papp and me. Usually it’s the authors who promote their books, but Frank is such a great storyteller and media savvy business leader that we thought the focus should be on him. Before Frank spoke at lunch to the Toronto Rotary, one of the members droned on for far too long about the public relations effort involved in the club’s one hundreth anniversary. Fortunately there was an interesting tidbit amid the dross. She...

The title of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s memoir, Total Recall, is perfect. It reminds us of his films and promises truth. Even such awful stories like how bad he feels again and again about cheating on his wife with the housekeeper. Still, a good memory about terrible events may be better than Bob Dylan who couldn’t remember anything about the 1960s when he sat down to write his life story which should have been called Total Blank. Anyway, all this got me to thinking about titles for memoirs yet to be written. Titles sell books, so here’s a few that may or...

Amanda Lang’s book launch last evening was a great success. Held in the CBC’s Barbara Frum Atrium on Front Street, it attracted a high-profile crowd of 150. There were politicians such as Paul Martin Jr. and Frank McKenna, authors Allan Fotheringham and Michael Bryant, and CBC colleagues News Editor-in-Chief Jennifer McGuire and Kevin O’Leary, Lang’s partner on The Lang & O’Leary Exchange. In addition, there were numerous friends and family members including her mother Adrian, step-father Donald Macdonald, and various siblings and offspring. The book, The Power of Why (HarperCollins) is about innovation, how it happens, and how we can...