Yearly Archive: 2021

Since the April death of Galen Weston, his son, Galen G. Weston, has been busy selling off what were once among the crown jewels in the family empire. It’s almost as if he didn’t want to make any of these moves as long as his father was still alive. Unlike many family businesses, this one has prospered since founder George Weston went into the bread business in Toronto in 1882. But what to make of all this recent activity? Among the many aspects of the business sold in recent months was the very core of the company — the bakery....

To all my loyal readers: May your Christmas be merry and bright. And may the year ahead bring good health and much happiness amid the turmoil that surrounds us.  Rod McQueen

Family businesses provide millions of jobs in Canada. Anyone can start a family business on a shoestring, in a basement, or a garage. Growing them beyond a hobby with a few hundred dollars in annual sales is difficult. Keeping them alive for the next generation is even tougher. Less than half of family businesses make it to the second generation. Only about 10 percent get to the third. “Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations,” said Seagram founder Sam Bronfman. His grandson, Edgar Jr., fulfilled that prophecy through a foolish merger with Vivendi that slashed the family fortune from $8 billion...

A recent report by the Auditor-General of Ontario underscored an issue that has received too little attention. Among all the provinces, Ontario gives its twenty-four publicly funded colleges $1.6 billion annually, the lowest level of support on a per capita basis in Canada. Meanwhile, enrolment by domestic students has fallen 15 percent over the last eight years. Money to run these institutions has to come from somewhere so they have turned to foreign students whose numbers have increased 342 percent during the same eight-year period. Foreign students now account for 30 percent of enrolment and because they pay three or...

Dear Prime Minister: You and your staff may have seen the story in the Globe and Mail Wednesday morning about a number of Liberal MPs and others who have their eye on your job. Now you know how Erin O’Toole feels. The list of your hopeful successors is lengthy and is said to include Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly, Innovation Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne, man-of-the-world and my personal favourite Mark Carney, former Quebec MP Frank Bayliss and Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland. The piece, written by Robert Fife, who usually gets things right, is careful to keep most of his sources...

Don’t you just love Quebecers and their views on language? Air Canada CEO Michael Rousseau gave a speech recently that was almost entirely in English. He admitted that he couldn’t speak French and allowed as how he’d got along just fine in Montreal for more than a decade without speaking French. He even congratulated Montrealers, saying, “I think that’s a testament to the city.”  Rousseau might as well have admitted to committing sexual harassment so noisy were the complaints that ensued. “Anglophone privilege,” said one, “with a touch of contempt on the side.” Rousseau has since undertaken to learn French....

Last summer when the federal election was called, I assumed that Mark Carney would run for office. Everything looked to be in place for the former governor of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England who had previously declared that he was a Liberal. He had just published a book, Value(s), that The Guardian called “magnificent” and a “landmark achievement,” high praise not usually given by the British newspaper. He was living in Ottawa and the safe Liberal seat of Ottawa Centre beckoned. But the man with a doctorate from Oxford did not run. At the time, I thought he’d...

Back in the day, the 1960s to be exact, when I showed up for first year at the University of Western Ontario, there was an organized frosh week. Purple Spur, a group of senior students, kept us busy all day, doing their bidding. I don’t remember all the indignities we were put through but picking up trash, barking like a dog, and generally feeling degraded were among them. The purpose, of course, was to create a community among the new arrivals. Western had only 5,000 students in those days, compared to 28,000 today, so it seemed easy to make friends....

If I ran the world, here’s what I’d do: * make vaccinations mandatory for all, even the anti-vaxxers and religious pull-backers; the rest of us have constitutional rights, too; * ban any and all tattoos on women; they’re reprehensible; * while we’re at it, lets’s ban those stretch Lululemon-style yoga leggings when they’re worn on the streets as the only body covering below the waist. Some women might be able to carry off such attire, but not many; * send Justin Trudeau to a voice coach to get rid of his annoying habit of pausing to draw a breath on...

Erin O’Toole is a dead duck. Despite the fact that the Conservatives won the popular vote in this week’s election, they did not win the seat count. That’s why the Liberals will never bring in election reform as they said they would. First-past-the-post works fine for them. Just as Andrew Scheer became a former leader after the last election, so too will O’Toole. If he doesn’t resign on his own, he will be pushed by the party and it will be as messy as it will be humiliating. The party will follow Oscar Wilde’s dictum, “A good friend will always stab...

Whatever the outcome of this election, the status of the Bloc Quebecois as a federal political party should be rescinded. The Bloc is little more than a bunch of hypocrites who take federal paycheques as well as federal funds for parliamentary staff and constituency offices all the while trying to create a sovereign Quebec. The party has had some electoral success in Quebec under a variety of leaders since its founding in 1991. Led by Lucien Bouchard and Gilles Duceppe, among others, the Bloc won fifty-four seats in 1993 and 2004 while hitting a low of two seats in 2014. At...

Keith Davey, Pierre Trudeau’s campaign manager, also known as “The Rainmaker,” used to say that every election required a move to the “radical middle.” By that he meant a political party shifted to the left to capture votes but then turned back to the right to govern. That radical middle was where Erin O’Toole was headed until he got rudely interrupted by reality. A week ago, according to the Nanos poll, he was a “political freight train” in the lead ahead of Justin Trudeau. Now, O’Toole is beginning to look more like a train wreck.  After all, can a Conservative...

This is the first federal election I can remember when coverage of leaders and issues is often well down in the TV newscasts. There are no dulcet tones of politicians until after Afghanistan, forest fires, Haiti and other catastrophes. This subterfuge may be regarded as helpful by the Liberals who have been hurt by the unpopularity of the early election call, the resurgence of Covid and the so-so performance of Justin Trudeau. By contrast, the chipper appearances and fully fleshed-out campaign commitments of Conservative leader Erin O’Toole have surprised everybody.  But what if, as appears likely, the outcome is another...

The first book I ever wrote was called The Moneyspinners: An Intimate Portrait of the Men Who Run Canada’s Banks. Published in 1983, it had chapters on each of the Big Five Bank Chairmen and Chief Executive Officers: Rowland Frazee of the Royal, Bill Mulholland of Bank of Montreal, Richard Thomson at TD, CIBC’s Russell Harrison and Cedric Ritchie of the Bank of Nova Scotia. Writing about businesspeople was so novel at the time that there were individuals who were shocked to find themselves quoted, even though I came to their offices, explained what I was doing and turned on...