What makes a teacher great

By Nicholas Köhler - Monday, March 14, 2011 at 5:16 PM - 7 Comments

Photograph By Andrew Tolson

In 1986, to recognize the importance of university teaching, the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education and 3M Canada created the 3M National Teaching Fellowships. Since 2006, Maclean’s has proudly been the program’s media sponsor. Here, we announce this year’s 10 winners, as well as profile one of them, English professor Nick Mount.

It is a rare warm day in what has proven to be a punishingly cold Toronto winter. It is a Friday afternoon—a Friday afternoon before a long weekend. In essence, it is the sort of afternoon for which the playing of hooky was invented. So why is Nick Mount standing on a stage before a sea of first-year students—hundreds of them, piled like waves up the sloping floor of a University of Toronto lecture theatre? “I’m actually,” admits Mount, “shocked you’re here.” He spends the next two hours reminding the class of 450 students why they are.

The topic today is the Chris Ware graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. The course is Literature for Our Time, a primer that encompasses all of Corrigan, Virginia Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness To the Lighthouse, and Toronto novelist Andrew Pyper’s literary noir The Killing Circle. Mount’s close reading of Corrigan, an anti-hero parable of fathers and sons that ends ambiguously with a Superman figure swooping angel-like upon the protagonist and carrying him away, is as careful in its attentions as Mount had been with either Woolf or Vladimir Nabokov’s dense, disturbing Lolita.

Continue…

RCMP launches investigation into Tory aide who blocked ATI request

By macleans.ca - Monday, March 14, 2011 at 5:12 PM - 10 Comments

As the federal government considers hiking user fees to access government information in order to “control demand,” the RCMP has begun an investigation into accusations of political interference by a Conservative staffer in an access-to-information (ATI) request. Public Works Minister Rona Ambrose has asked that the RCMP investigate the actions of Sebastien Togneri, a Tory political aide who reportedly demanded that Public Works officials “unrelease” a requested document that was to be sent to The Canadian Press. Ambrose directed the RCMP to look into Togneri’s actions after Canada’s information commissioner concluded a year-long investigation showing the aide had interfered in the request without the proper authorization.

At the same time, the federal government is debating on whether to increase user fees for information requests as part of its reforms to the ATI fee system, which the Treasury Board called “outdated and does not reflect new technologies and formats.” Currently, requestors pay a flat fee of $5 for an information request, which the adds up to less than one per cent of the $47-million cost of the more than 35,000 requests made between 2009-2010.

CTV News

Winnipeg Free Press

Wanted: a Republican leader for 2012

By John Parisella - Monday, March 14, 2011 at 4:51 PM - 21 Comments

You would expect someone to have declared their intention to run for the 2012 Republican nomination by now. After all, in recent election cycles, the campaigning began shortly after the mid terms. For instance, Barack Obama announced in February 2007—and he wasn’t even the the first. It is strange that no one on the Republican side appears to be feeling the wind in his or her back in this cycle. With the economy recovering slowly and Obama’s approval ratings split nearly straight down the middle, shouldn’t Republicans be feeling like he is vulnerable? And if that’s not the case, then what, exactly, is happening? Continue…

Android isn't really open. It's just less closed than Apple.

By Jesse Brown - Monday, March 14, 2011 at 2:34 PM - 21 Comments

Idiots worldwide rejoiced when news came that the iBoobs app, censored by Apple, had found a home in the Android Marketplace.

For those tragically unfamiliar with iBoobs—how can I describe it? It’s boobs. They jiggle. A settings screen lets you adjust things like “boob weight,” “stifness,” and “gravity factor.” If any of this turns you on, I’d like to introduce you to a killer app called porn.

iBoobs is a Freemium product. If you upgrade from the free ”iBoobs light” app to the $2.10 paid app, you can toss the boobs around with the tip of your finger.  Or at least, you could last week. It seems that Google has since followed Apple’s lead (at least partially) and banned the paid version of the app.

What could possibly have been the problem?

The boobs themselves are still available.  Google is not anti-boob, per se. No statement has been issued, and so we must speculate: it seems Google’s official policy on boobs is that it’s okay to shake them around really hard, so long as you don’t poke, smoosh, flick or pull them.

Google is such a tease.

Perhaps it wasn’t the touching—maybe Google objected to iBoob’s extras—shake them boobs just right, and you get a peek of nipple.

This feature alone places iBoobs outside of the Android Marketplace’s prohibition on nudity and sexually explicit material.  This, you may remember, was not always the case.  The Android Marketplace was initially open to all apps—that was its defining attribute. But after Android surged in popularity (and after Steve Jobs sneered puritanically in Google’s direction) the porn was cut.  Google retreated to a middling position on sex apps designed to keep them just a bit more risque then Apple; hardcore was out, nudity too, but sexy apps could stay if they identified themselves as not for kids. As Google puts it: “Apps that focus on suggestive or sexual references must be rated ‘High maturity’.”

High maturity. iBoobs certainly doesn’t qualify for that.

The fact is, Google is supposed to be busy organizing the world’s information, not jiggling CGI jugs around to determine where they stand on their arbitrary porno-scale.  If Android is open, then let it be open. Open doesn’t mean “less closed than Apple,” it means open. Open to any dumb app that any dumb person wants to make or to use.

Kinda like the Internet.

Steven Soderbergh ready to retire

By macleans.ca - Monday, March 14, 2011 at 2:09 PM - 2 Comments

He’s only 48 years old, but Steven Soderbergh says he plans to retire after wrapping his next two films—Liberace, starring Matt Damon and Michael Douglas, and The Man From U.N.C.L.E., starring George Clooney. Soderbergh burst onto the scene 22 years ago with his debut feature, Sex, Lies and Videotape, which won the Palme d’Or in Cannes and triggered a new wave in indie cinema. Since then he has proved to be one of America’s most versatile directors, swinging from Hollywood hits like Oceans 11 and the Oscar-winning Erin Brockovich to daring experiments like Solaris and The Good German. Soderbergh, who worships French auteur Jean-Luc Godard, has never seemed satisfied with commercial success. And lately he’s shown more verve with a low-budget outings like The Girfriend Experience and his recent documentary on Spalding Grey than with big-budget features. The director is incredibly prolific. With two star-driven studio pictures on his plate, and another two movies in the can (Contagion, Haywire), perhaps he’s just suffering temporary burn-out. Or longing to flee to the fringes of the avant garde. But even if he makes good on his promise to stop directing movies, he’s highly active in producing them—and he hasn’t said he’ll stop doing that. Or, he could always follow Gwyneth Paltrow’s lead, and try to become a pop star.

Reuters

Econowatch: If a giant stumbles…

By Chris Sorensen - Monday, March 14, 2011 at 1:21 PM - 1 Comment

For the past decade, it has been difficult to pick-up a newspaper without reading a headline about China’s phenomenal economic growth and its impact on everything from oil prices to global food supplies. And thanks to our resource-based economy, Canada in particular has benefitted from the boom in commodity prices sparked by China’s seemingly insatiable appetite for oil and other raw materials. But what happens if China’s growth were to slow dramatically over the next few years?

That is the question that two senior TD economists tackled in a report out today. While they caution their outlook is for moderating of growth to 9 per cent to 9.5 per cent between now and 2013, Craig Alexander and Pascal Gauthier conducted what they called a “stress test” for the Canadian economy by looking at the impact of a relatively anemic growth rate (for China at least) of just 5 per cent to 7 per cent over the same time period—an unlikely, but still possible, outcome of current efforts by the Chinese government to reign in inflation and keep housing prices in check. The results aren’t pretty.

While there would be an immediate hit to Canadian exports, it turns out that is the least of our problems. The real damage would come from a slowing of the global economy as a fragile recovery is knocked off course. Commodity prices would plummet, taking Canada’s economy down with it. In their model, the price of oil alone would plunge between 30 per cent and 40 per cent. “A swift decline in commodity prices would dramatically impact Canada’s terms of trade and aggregate income, with these impacts being especially pronounced among resource-based regions of the country,” the authors write, adding that overall income in Canada could fall by $100 billion in just one year.

Of course, this is likely a worst case scenario. But it nevertheless highlights China’s huge influence on our economic fortunes. For better or worse.

Conservative government spends $26-million on winter ad blitz

By macleans.ca - Monday, March 14, 2011 at 1:05 PM - 19 Comments

By the time its “winter ad blitz” is done, the federal government will have spent $26-million in taxpayer dollars to promote the Economic Action Plan. The three-month media buy targeted televised events with high viewership, such as the Super Bowl and the Oscars, between January 11 and March 31. Three federal departments shared the cost of the ad purchase: Human Resources and Development Canada spent $14.5-million over nine weeks; the Canada Revenue Agency budgeted $6.5-million over 11 weeks; and the Ministry of Finance shelled out $5-million.

The Globe and Mail

Ottawa offers “any and all aid” to Japan

By macleans.ca - Monday, March 14, 2011 at 12:52 PM - 17 Comments

The Canadian government says it is ready to offer “any and all” possible aid to Japan after Friday’s devastating 8.9-magnitude earthquake and tsunami. On Sunday, Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon’s office released a statement saying it was prepared to offer Canadian Forces personnel, a 17-member victim identification team, as well as chemical, biological and nuclear expertise and equipment. “As Prime Minister Stephen Harper stated,” said Cannon, “Canada stands ready to provide any and all possible assistance to the people of Japan.” As Canada remains on standby to provide assistance, there is no word on whether the Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART) will be dispatched.

CBC News

2,000 bodies come ashore in Japan

By macleans.ca - Monday, March 14, 2011 at 12:47 PM - 2 Comments

The Kyodo News reports that the official death toll of 1,597 is set to jump dramatically following Friday’s devastating earthquake in Japan after the discovery of approximately 1,000 bodies found coming ashore on hardest-hit Miyagi’s Ojika Peninsula. Another 1,000 have been spotted in the virtually obliterated town of Minamisanriku, where the prefectural government has been unable to contact about 10,000 people, or over half the local population. The situation is so grim, that the Miyagi prefectural government has decided to ask for help from other prefectures as work to cremate bodies is falling behind.

Kyodo News

Bahraini protesters shut down financial centre

By macleans.ca - Monday, March 14, 2011 at 12:39 PM - 0 Comments

Anti-government protesters in Bahrain shut down the country’s financial district in the capital of Manama on Sunday. The blockade was the most serious challenge to the ruling Bahraini monarchy since protests began in February. Police responded by firing teargas and rubber bullets at the protestors. Meanwhile, at the main university campus, clashes erupted after protesters accused security forces of protecting armed vigilantes tasked with fomenting tensions between the majority Shiite population and the Sunni ruling elite. The protests came a day after U.S. Secretary of Defence Robert Gates met with the ruling Khalifa family to warn against the use of force in quelling protests. Gates expressed worries that Iran might be looking for ways to exploit the sectarian tensions, and told reporters, “time is not our friend.”

New York Times

The Abandonment of Cable News

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, March 14, 2011 at 12:12 PM - 2 Comments

It looks like cable news has, as this article puts it, reached a peak: last year all three major U.S. cable news networks lost viewer, the first time in this study where all three of them declined in the same year. It’s not just CNN, though none of us will be surprised to hear that its decline was the worst. Fox News is still way ahead of the others, but — even though 2010 was an election year — they were down 11 percent. (It’s well-known that Glenn Beck has been losing viewers, but he’s not the only one.) MSNBC declined the least, but I’d be willing to bet that’ll change this year, given that they let go of their most popular opinion personality.

The study does note that even with fewer viewers, cable news was making more money last year, due to a partial economic recovery (for the TV industry anyway).

Stockwell Day, so-con icon, bows out

By John Geddes - Monday, March 14, 2011 at 12:08 PM - 16 Comments

News that he isn’t going to run again in the next federal election has me thinking back on my favourite Stockwell Day stories, one of which features a telling one-liner from Gerry Ritz on the sensitive subject of religion in conservative politics.

It was late in the winter of 2002, and Day was running what turned out to be a losing campaign against Stephen Harper for the leadership of the Canadian Alliance.  In a meeting room above a curling rink in suburban Ottawa, Day had just delivered a bravura performance, energizing his supporters by portraying himself as the victim of both the national media elite’s scorn for social conservatives and the machinations of shadowy “backroom” schemers in his own party.

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Meltdown threatens Fukushima plant

By macleans.ca - Monday, March 14, 2011 at 11:51 AM - 3 Comments

Technicians are struggling to stabilize a third reactor at Japan’s Daiichi plant in Fukushima prefecture, which has been rocked by blasts for three days following the devastating 8.9 magnitude earthquake that has crippled the country. Radioactive fuel rods became exposed after the reactor’s cooling system broke down, resulting in a hydrogen blast that has injured 11 people. Plant operators have resumed pumping seawater into a second reactor after its coolant system broke, resulting in declining temperatures. Both nuclear experts and the Tokyo Electric Power Co. maintain that a Chernobyl-scale disaster is unlikely due to thick containment walls remaining intact, and the more rigorous safety measures in place. But, a U.S. aircraft carrier has been moved from the area after detecting low-level radiation 160 km offshore. A 30-km exclusion zone has been enforced around the plant, and tens of thousands of people have been evacuated from the area in the event of a nuclear meltdown.

BBC News

Go home

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, March 14, 2011 at 11:50 AM - 15 Comments

Ian Austen profiles Michael Ignatieff for the New York Times.

Like many of the ancestors in his mother’s family who went abroad, Mr. Ignatieff concluded that he would never be fully a part of life in either of his adopted homes in London and Cambridge, Mass. “I know quite a bit about expatriation,” he said. “You always hit a glass ceiling.”

In Britain, that realization came when he was told that he would not be given a television project because he was Canadian. In the United States, it was more a matter of gradual alienation. Mr. Ignatieff said he found the debates in the last decade about stem cell research, abortion and public health care almost baffling. “What are they arguing about?” he recalled thinking. “I don’t want to overstate this, as I love American politics. But you do come up that it’s not your home.”

Hey look: Michael Ignatieff (is pretty sure he) needs a spotlight

By Paul Wells - Monday, March 14, 2011 at 11:21 AM - 26 Comments

From the magazine, this week’s cover story, on the Ignatieff paradox: deeply unpopular and praying for an election.

Ken Finkleman doesn't 'get' women

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, March 14, 2011 at 10:41 AM - 4 Comments

HBO Canada

Ken Finkleman says he’s “terrible at writing women. I should not be allowed to do it.” So why is Good Dog, the newest series from Canada’s most famous TV creator-star (The Newsroom), about his relationship with a woman—and not just any woman, but one half his age? The pilot, which aired on the Movie Network last Sunday, seemed like another of Finkleman’s reality-TV parodies, as his character, George, is forced to move in with his beautiful young girlfriend (Lauren Lee Smith) by a network that’s making a reality show about his life. In the episodes to come, though, the show plot goes by the wayside, and the show becomes something fairly new: a Finkleman show about relationships. If we thought it was awkward to see Finkleman satirize the world of news and media, wait until we see him try to deal with what he calls “a social situation with this woman.”

Finkleman has hardly ignored women in his previous work. The Newsroom featured a lot of scenes for the long-suffering TV producer Karen (Karen Hines), and another series, Married Life, made a young woman a sympathetic character in yet another satire of reality shows. But the women were often overshadowed by the large cast of lunatics played by Finkleman and other actors. This may be because, as Finkleman explains, he has trouble getting inside the heads of female characters: “I can see only how they react to me. I can describe how they look, how they sit, how they dress, tons of things. But only on the surface. My perception stops there.”

Continue…

What we're getting wrong

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, March 14, 2011 at 10:29 AM - 3 Comments

Ken Dryden wonders how we’ll look back on the present violence in hockey and football.

The voices of the future will not be kind to us about how we understood and dealt with head injuries in sports. They will ask: How is it possible we didn’t know, or chose not to know?

For players or former players, owners, managers, coaches, doctors and team doctors, league executives, lawyers, agents, the media, players’ wives, partners and families, it’s no longer possible not to know and not to be afraid, unless we willfully close our eyes.

Go away, media. You're jerks and I hate you.

By Scott Feschuk - Monday, March 14, 2011 at 10:19 AM - 69 Comments

Getty Images; Reuters; Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute

Authors have devoted entire books to trying to decipher and understand Stephen Harper. But is he really that complex? I’d say his pattern of behaviour over recent years has given Canadians a rather clear sense of who he is.

He’s the only leader of a G8 country who also happens to be a seven-year-old boy.

Skeptical? The proof begins atop the prime ministerial head. A seven-year-old boy has the haircut of a seven-year-old boy. So does Stephen Harper.

But it goes beyond that. Let’s examine the behavioural characteristics of a typical seven-year-old—as taken from a variety of child development resources—and see how our PM checks out.

— Your seven-year-old may be rude, critical and impatient.

Hmm. Sounds vaguely familiar.

— He is the centre of his own world and tends to be boastful.

Canada’s back, baby. It’s back because of me. I MADE CANADA BACK!

— Generally, he is rigid, negative, demanding; he exhibits tantrums.

Okay, this is starting to get uncanny.

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Inside the Liberal effort to resurrect Michael Ignatieff

By Paul Wells - Monday, March 14, 2011 at 10:19 AM - 361 Comments

Photograph by Christopher Pike

Michael Ignatieff has been among the people.

“I’m in Newfoundland two weeks ago,” the Liberal leader said over tea in the sunroom at Stornaway, the official Opposition leader’s residence. On the wall behind him was a landscape by the Winnipeg artist Ivan Eyre, all slate-grey skies and autumn foliage. “And I’m in a training centre run by the operating engineers’ union. Great union. And this training site is training people in heavy machinery. Everything from bulldozers to cranes.

“A third of the kids in the course are women. Half of the women are on social assistance. They’re desperate to get a union ticket to be bulldozer drivers or crane operators. They’re fabulously determined. It’s a tough course. They put me into these damned cranes and I don’t know what the hell I’m doing, and they look fabulous. One of the women said to me, ‘You know, this is my ticket out of here. This is the ticket that allows me out of social assistance. This is my ticket that allows me to feed my kids. But I can’t do this if I don’t get child care.’

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Chart of the week: Feel-good economy

By Colin Campbell - Monday, March 14, 2011 at 10:16 AM - 12 Comments

Source: CFID

Canadian small and mid-sized businesses are brimming with confidence again. Optimism is at its highest level since the recession.

Is this Tim's new lid?

By Jason Kirby - Monday, March 14, 2011 at 10:06 AM - 9 Comments

Karen Bleier/Afp/Getty Images

As Maclean’s noted two weeks ago, legions of Tim Hortons coffee sippers regularly complain the company’s lids have fallen way behind the competition. They leak, and the tabs never stay open. It’s clearly a hot-button issue—our original story is the most-read article on Macleans.ca this year. So behold, the new Tim Hortons coffee lid (sort of). This week Doug Stitt, an Ohio resident and Tim Hortons regular, sent us a photo of a new lid that debuted at his local Timmies. Stitt, who spoke to Maclean’s for our original story, was told the new lid is part of an “experiment” and was only available in one size: extra-large. A company spokesman says the new lid is being test-marketed for specialty drinks (though Stitt got his with just a regular coffee), but the company has good news for dribble-sufferers: Tim Hortons is working with its supplier on a redesign of its current flip-tab lids, which will hit stores later this year.

This week: Newsmakers

By macleans.ca - Monday, March 14, 2011 at 10:06 AM - 0 Comments

Dancing all the way to freedom

Following in the delicate footsteps of the great Mikhail Baryshnikov, who slipped away from his Soviet handlers during a ballet performance in Toronto in 1974, five Cuban ballet dancers appear to have defected to Canada following a performance in Montreal last month. Four are taking classes in Toronto with the National Ballet of Canada, while the fifth is in Montreal. Elier Bourzac, one of the lead performers of the National Ballet of Cuba, told the Montreal Gazette his reasons for leaving his troupe had more to do with artistic freedoms than escaping a Communist regime. It’s the same reason, virtually word-for-word, that Baryshnikov gave during his first post-defection interview at the height of the Cold War.

Leo Mason/Corbis

Time to pay le piper

For more than 20 years, former French president Jacques Chirac avoided prosecution for misusing public funds in order to fuel his rising political star. Between 1977 and 1995, while mayor of Paris, investigators say, the 78-year-old misused city money, having 28 phantom jobs on the payroll at city hall. Protected by presidential immunity until the end of his second term in 2007, he will now be tried in the courtroom in which Marie-Antoinette was sent to the guillotine. If he’s found guilty, his sentence would be lighter: a fine, up to 10 years in prison, or a 10-year ban on holding office. For now, the trial is delayed by three months, following an objection from the defence.

A blow for reform in Pakistan

News that Shahbaz Bhatti, Pakistan’s only Christian cabinet minister, had been assassinated on March 2 hit Jason Kenney hard. On a visit to Ottawa in February, Bhatti had told the Canadian immigration minister he expected to be killed for advocating changes to Pakistan’s harsh blasphemy laws, which are used as a pretext to persecute religious minorities. Kenney told Maclean’s Bhatti even asked Canada to help his family when he was dead. In a strange twist, while Kenney was in Pakistan to attend Bhatti’s memorial service, his staff broke parliamentary rules by issuing a partisan fundraising letter on his ministerial letterhead—resulting in calls for Kenney’s resignation.

Continue…

The rank amateurs trying to bring down Gadhafi

By Ruth Sherlock in Ras Lanuf - Monday, March 14, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 5 Comments

Goran Tomasevic/Reuters

Out of the clear blue sky came the ominous roar of the incoming bomber. At the chaotic checkpoint in Ras Lanuf, rebel fighters who took the strategic oil port city last Friday wildly fired anti-aircraft guns. Cars blared their horns and skidded away. Men flung themselves behind sand dunes, or vehicles loaded with ammunition. Seconds later, the plane dropped its bomb. It exploded in the sand, 30 m from the road.

Moments before, the rebels had been decrying the disaster that was befalling them 50 km west. There, Col. Moammar Gadhafi had unleashed the full fury of his military arsenal, with warplanes and ground troops repelling the westward rebel advance at Bin Jawad, the last town on the coastal highway before the Libyan leader’s birthplace of Sirte. Rebel forces were hit with Katyusha rockets and airborne missiles. It being too dangerous to even rescue their fallen comrades, fighters were reduced to firing bursts of rifle and anti-aircraft fire into the air in helpless defiance.

For the rebels who rose up against Gadhafi on Feb. 15, the past week provided sobering moments. After gains that saw them taking control of much of the eastern part of Libya, their drive westward toward Tripoli, and uprisings in towns around the Libyan capital, stalled in the face of the colonel’s air power, as forces loyal to the regime launched counterattacks to try to regain strategic assets. In the town of Zawiyah, just 50 km east of Tripoli, taken by the rebels on Feb. 27, Gadhafi launched a devastating assault complete with some 50 tanks. Witnesses spoke of indiscriminate killing, with women and children mowed down in the streets.

Continue…

In conversation: Brett Wilson

By Nicholas Köhler - Monday, March 14, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 19 Comments

Photographs By Chris Bolin

Brett Wilson, the Calgary-based investment banker and philanthropist who came to national prominence as the “dragon with a heart” on the highly rated CBC reality television show Dragon’s Den, is now no dragon at all. He and the CBC parted ways following difficult contract negotiations in which he says the broadcaster insisted he never mention his association with the CBC or the show during public appearances or in promoting his own work. Wilson had been the most active investor on the show, which sees entrepreneurs seeking capital pitch their ideas before a panel of “dragons.”

Q: Your departure from the show has garnered a good deal of attention—why do you think people care so much?

A: First of all I was surprised that CBC issued a press release saying I was leaving. I thought I would just sort of fade into obscurity. I happened to be getting on a plane when they issued that release, so I didn’t have a chance to see it for four or five hours. In the meantime there were an awful lot of phone calls to my office asking why, how come? I think there’s an irony in the eyes of some viewers—or some media—that a dragon couldn’t get a deal negotiated for his own purposes, or his own contract, if you will. And I suspect there is.

Q: You’ve challenged the CBC to dole out what you’ve called “constructive criticism as opposed to abuse” on the show. What prompted you to make that challenge?

A: I want it to respect the intelligence of the viewing community—you know, there isn’t a business school in the country that isn’t paying attention to this show. I was the lead deal-making dragon. I don’t know how many deals the other dragons have actually done or closed, but I managed to get 60 done on the show, and we’ve papered 30, and 31 should be done in the next couple weeks. That’s where my own fan base says, “Thank you for showing us how to do deals.” It’s easy to say, “No,” it takes no courage, no brains and no wallet to criticize. Criticism comes free. Action comes at some cost, and I’ve been pretty active. Will the 30 investments I’ve made all work out? Absolutely not. I suspect I’ll write off four or five in the next year because they’re stumbling. But there’s four or five that could become iconic brands in Canada because of the power of the entrepreneur. Any one of those top-five investments will pay for all 30. So I take a portfolio approach.

Q: Listening to you outline your approach—that a handful of your investments will likely pay for those that fail—is “dragon with a heart”
less about generosity or emotion than it is a sound approach to investing?

A: I invest in people. I get value from helping people, and I get value on my money. So both of those make sense. I choose partners based on the people I want to do business with because business plans evolve—we stumble, we trip, we jump, we leap, we go to different plateaus—but the people in whom we’ve invested are still the people. My partners are a core of my success. That’s been my success over the years. In the investing world I do get value for helping people, but I don’t give up financial return to get that.

Q: Some argue you’ve been Kevin O’Leary’s foil, that the CBC built the show on a Kevin-versus-Brett narrative. Were you ever coached into participating in that kind of dynamic?

A: Just the opposite. When I first tried out for the show, the commentary from CBC was that I wasn’t mean enough. I said, “Look, if it means being a prick, I’m not interested. If it means being tough when you need to be tough, check my credentials, my success, my partners, and my life, and just know I can get there.” I think in the eyes of some of the people who were putting the show together, they thought the Kevin-esque approach was typical—that he was your normal, tough-as-nails, chew-’em-up, spit-’em-out businessman. I would suggest just the opposite. I run into a lot of people who take a very hands-on, people-centric approach to investing. It’s not that Kevin’s wrong and Brett’s right. It’s that the range exists.

Q: What’s called reality television, or “factual entertainment,” as the CBC prefers to call it, are masterpieces of editing.

A: I call it “contrived reality,” because it is orchestrated. Now, when I say “orchestrated,” the dragons were never coached, we were never told what to say. To put credit where it’s due, CBC’s done a fabulous job with this format. I’m told both inside and outside CBC that CBC’s version of Dragon’s Den is used as the gold standard globally against the other 16 or 18 or 20 that exist around the world. I’m talking about how to put the icing on the cake, here, not saying throw away the cake.

Q: But it must be an odd sensation to watch how your exchanges are shaped in the cutting room. What’s that experience been like?

A: In the early seasons it was frustrating. One of my favourite questions I ask every entrepreneur I invest in is, “How much time and how much money have you got invested in this idea?” There’s no wrong answer, but I do need to know. Have you been working on it for 10 years and you’re beating a dead horse? Or did this just come to you a week ago and you’ve got daddy’s money behind you? Or is this your heart and soul? I don’t think that question has ever made it to air. CBC is looking for that quick repartee, what you would call the juicy moment. I know that’s what they’re chasing in the editing room, and I’m completely okay with that. They own the mouse that does the cutting.

Q: But do they make the exchanges sharper than they really are?

A: I would suggest to you that they edit out some of the heated exchanges. It doesn’t get nasty but sometimes it might be a little bit too snippy, a little bit too rude.

Q: What’s the best advice you’ve given?

A: People who come on the show overestimate the share of market they can achieve. First they guesstimate the market—let’s say $1 billion in widgets can be sold next year and they say, “Well, jeez, I can get one per cent of that market, therefore I can make $10 million.” My response is, it might cost you $50 million to pursue that slice of the market, and you don’t have that money. I don’t care if you can make it—if you can’t sell it, there’s no point. Understanding your market—who will buy it and who will buy it at a profitable price—is key.

Q: You’ve done 60 deals on the show and about 30 have led to cheques being written. What happens to those 30 that don’t work?

A: Of those 30, I would say 10 were people who didn’t ultimately want to do a deal—they weren’t ready. There were another 10 where due diligence didn’t hold up. In one case someone on the show said, “I have a signed memorandum of understanding,” which turned out was an email expressing interest in a deal. There’s a big gap. I would say the other 10 would be ones where, when we did the homework, we just weren’t comfortable. In one case—again, names don’t matter—I just became uncomfortable with the entrepreneur. I didn’t like the way my people were treated. So I pulled the pin and said, “I will not tolerate that kind of abuse,” if you want to call it that, “of my own people.” You know—kissing me and kicking my staff. That’s not a relationship that’s a basis for anything. Not every marriage has to be consummated.

Q: Some of the pitches can be heartbreaking. I remember seeing an engineer who’d designed a device that would open Freezies for his kid, and he’d sunk $250,000 of his money into it. And he was turned away on the show with five outs. I’m not sure if you remember the case.

A: Oh, I remember it very, very well. He had an amazing product, it was beautifully engineered. He could make it—but he couldn’t sell enough of them to justify his investment. It was one of those sad moments for me where I’m looking, going, “You know what? This isn’t a product that the market needs.” On the flip side, it’s that passion, that sometimes blind belief in oneself, that allows some businesses and products to move forward.

Q: I also watched as you listened to 18-year-old Ben Gulak pitch his motorized unicycle, the Uno, and you were clearly enchanted.

A: Here was a kid who I looked at and thought—you know what? Even if Uno doesn’t work exactly as it’s been invented, I want to be this guy’s go-to, his brain trust, I want to be his wallet for the next idea. Because coming out of a kid who’s 18, who’s built this Uno literally out of scrap parts in his family garage, who’s been accepted to MIT, that’s a kid I wouldn’t mind investing in. You know, the evaluations that were applied to the original round of financing for Google and Yahoo and eBay and Amazon and Facebook probably made no sense either.

Q: You’ve hinted that a television show around philanthropy could be in your future. I think it’s fair to say the received wisdom goes that people like watching greed, or the consequences of greed. Can you make compelling TV out of philanthropy?

A: Time will tell. I would entertain putting myself in front of the camera again if it was to celebrate entrepreneurship or celebrate philanthropy. I happen to be one of those who still thinks a good-news television network makes sense. I understand that “if it bleeds, it leads.” But I also think there’s an awful lot of people who are tired of the irrelevance. Let’s be serious here—The Bachelorette shows are completely irrelevant. They make interesting TV, but there’s no learning, no education, no nothing other than a fairly low-brow way of spending an hour watching some guy bouncing from bed to bed.