In conversation: Walter Isaacson
By Jonathon Gatehouse - Monday, November 7, 2011 - 0 Comments
The Steve Jobs biographer on the Apple founder’s genius, cruelty, obsessions, and indifference to money
Photograph by Joshua Roberts/Getty Images
In his final months, Steve Jobs opened up all aspects of his life to his sanctioned biographer, Walter Isaacson, granting more than 40 interviews. In an exclusive Canadian interview, the author of Steve Jobs talks about the computer mogul’s genius, and his dark side.
Q: You write that Jobs was “the ultimate icon of inventiveness, imagination and sustained innovation,” but you could also add master salesman to that list. Wasn’t his greatest product himself?
A: No, I think his greatest product was actually Apple, because it combines his marketing skills with his engineering and design skills. At Apple, everything is integrated—all functions of the company. He was a master showman; he knew that the unveiling of a product should be a grand moment. But he personally helped design the packaging, so when you opened an Apple product you felt a bit of excitement as you saw the iPhone in the little cradle. I know that seems silly and small, but it was marketing tied in with the sort of whole aura of owning an Apple product.
Q: So was his ability to synthesize all of these various things in itself singular?
A: Yes. Look at the grand philosophy of Steve Jobs: it’s to control the user experience from the silicon chip to the shirt on the store clerk. The hardware, the software, the content and the devices are all tightly integrated, and the marketing is part of that as well. Companies like Microsoft and Google make software they license out to other people who put it on hardware and it’s sold in other people’s stores. That’s a good business model, but it doesn’t make for artistically pure and delightful products.
Q: When Jobs first approached you to write a biography about him in 2004, you turned him down. Why was that?
A: Well, in a casual conversation, he said, “Would you ever think of writing a biography of me?” And I thought, well, he’s younger than me, and in the midst of an up-and-down career, so I said: “You know, maybe 20 years from now, when you retire.” I didn’t realize that he was sick, and once I did I also realized he was transforming industries while battling cancer, and what a dramatic story that was.
Q: But the turning point came when his wife, Laurene, approached you in 2009 and said it was sort of now or never?
A: Yes, we just happened to be together, and she mentioned, “If you’re ever going to write about Steve, you ought to do it now.” It was right after he went on his medical leave that involved a liver transplant in ’09, and I hadn’t really focused on the fact that he was that sick. He had just transformed the music industry and was doing it to the telephone industry, so it was a pretty dramatic time.
Q: He was a famously controlling guy, yet he pledged that he wasn’t going to interfere with your work. Did he keep that promise?
A: Yes, except for a cover he thought was ugly. He started expressing that sentiment strongly to me, and said he would only keep co-operating if he got some say over it. I thought that was a great offer, since he had a great design sense.
Q: What did he object to about the first cover?
A: Oh, it had a little picture of him when he was young inside of an Apple logo. It was gimmicky.
Q: When he called you, was it one of those infamous Steve Jobs conversations?
A: Well, he expressed himself clearly and forcefully, but I knew enough about Steve that it neither surprised me nor worried me, because that was his way of being honest. He could be brutal, but it wasn’t something you were supposed to take personally.
Q: He was also a charismatic figure with an ability to get people to buy into his vision, which was so powerful his friends referred to it as his “reality distortion field.” How did you deal with that?
A: I tried to talk to as many people as I could. The tough thing about Jobs is that he had such a strong personality that those around him remember the exact same meeting in different ways, like the movie Rashomon. Even the scene of his resignation from Apple—I interviewed Steve and three other people, and I got four different versions.
Q: Your book is filled with examples of Jobs’s wilful cruelty to others. Is there one instance of his callousness that really stood out for you?
A: No, just the opposite. He could be tough on people, [but] it was never deeply cruel. It was all about the moment, and it ended up creating a team of brutally honest star players who loved to have strong conversations and disagreements. Once you learned to take it, it was in some ways inspiring.
Q: Inspiring for some people, right? I mean, you’ve quoted one of his friends saying that his big question for Steve was, “Why are you so mean?”
A: Right, but that’s about snapping people’s heads off, or saying rough things. You judge it by the outcome, and even the friend who said that remained close to Steve to the end, and was at the memorial service.
Q: One of his former girlfriends suggested to you that he had narcissistic personality disorder, and the former CEO of Apple called him bipolar. Do you think there was an element of mental illness in Steve Jobs?
A: He had an incredibly intense personality, and certainly felt like he was special and all the rules didn’t apply to him. But I don’t think there was a mental disorder.
Q: Jobs was adopted at birth into what was a pretty loving family, but some people still see that as an explanation for his later behaviour. Do you think he had abandonment issues?
A: He said his adoptive parents made him feel special and chosen. But I do think that there was a journey throughout his life for understanding and enlightenment that had, as one of its elements, figuring out who he was and his place in the world.
Q: You’ve dealt with that spiritual side of Jobs too, what you call “his compulsive search for self-awareness.” Was he self-aware?
A: Oh, yeah. He even had a good sense of humour about himself. If you asked, “Why are you so tough on people?” he would say, “That’s who I am. I don’t want to be one of those artificially polite people who never can make a dent in the universe.”
Q: That attitude manifested itself in a kind of binary viewpoint as well, where products were “amazing” or they were “sh—y,” and people were “enlightened” or they were “a–holes.” How was that outlook linked to his success?
A: I think it gave him the temperament of an artist, which is either “It’s perfect” or “It sucks.” That separated him from most technology executives, who put out version 3.1, then 3.2, and never try to nail it. I think that passion was also the reason he wanted end-to-end control over all the products he made. I’m not a psychologist, so I don’t know what causes somebody to become such a perfectionist, but that’s the way he looked at the world. Even the original Macintosh team, he made them sign the inside of the computer case because, he said, “real artists sign their work.”
Q: In the book there are a lot of scenes of Jobs crying when he’s confronted, or told no, or even when he’s happy. Was that manipulative, or was he really that fragile underneath it all?
A: I don’t think his crying was manipulative, I think he was a very emotional person who could be deeply touched by the people he loved, such as his wife, or by a great design, or even a beautiful piece of ad copy.
Q: In 1985, he was ousted from Apple, the company he had founded. What lessons do you think he absorbed from that?
A: I think his real learning experience was after, at NeXT Computer, where he got to indulge all of his best and worst instincts. He wanted to make the product a perfect cube, and over-designed it so that it became overpriced and flopped in the marketplace. So I think that once he came back to Apple he realized he had to be more sensible and more mature. In a broader sense, that’s the whole narrative arc of the book, whether it’s in his personal life or in the way he ran Apple the second time or even the way he handled cancer, which was in a romantic and poetic way at first, but he quickly then looked for the most advanced scientific ways to handle it.
Q: What about his relationship with money? Compared to a lot of moguls, he lived a fairly simple life with a modest house in Palo Alto.
A: Yes, he lived in a normal house in a normal neighbourhood, having dinner almost every night around the kitchen table with his family. He didn’t try to become a celebrity or have an entourage. When he was very young and went to India on a pilgrimage, he was penniless, and a few years later he was worth more than $100 million. He said money didn’t matter to him much when he had none, and it didn’t matter to him much when he had all he could possibly want.
Q: He was a guy who was capable of acts of generosity, but not particularly generous. You write that his philanthropic foundation was left to wither.
A: Right. His wife is a very noted and active venture philanthropist who has started Education Track, which is a great after-school program in America, but Steve focused more on work. And I think that when we look at what’s going to transform education, all the good work of the non-profits might not end up being more important than the invention of the iPad, which could transform education for everybody.
Q: You quote Bill Gates as saying that he wished he had Steve’s taste. But in some ways Jobs’s obsession with design was almost paralyzing. You tell this amazing story about him refusing to put on an oxygen mask after his liver transplant because he didn’t like its looks. Did he care too much about form?
A: Well, he cared passionately about it. But how else do you explain why the iPod and the iPhone and the iPad were completely transformative, whereas rival products have trouble catching hold? There’s an artistry infused into them that doesn’t exist in HP tablets or Microsoft music players.
Q: You write that Jobs was a genius, but not overly smart. What do you mean by that?
A: He didn’t approach things in the rigorous, analytic way that a Bill Gates would. When Steve came back from India, he said, “I learned the importance of intuition as opposed to just relying on Western rational thought.” And that ability to use intuition, imagination and aesthetics in assessing a problem allowed him to think differently. He was ingenious more than simply being really smart.
Q: Sometimes that became a trap. When he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he spent nine months trying to heal himself through juices and diet. How he could he be so dumb?
A: Well, he had a poetic, alternative aspect to his personality that went back to his hippie days. His romantic side first looked for alternative ways to deal with it. Then he engaged his rational side and ended up with the most advanced cancer treatments based on DNA sequencing and targeted therapies. So, as always, with the cancer, with his work, with his personal life, the romantic side of Steve connects to the sensible side of Steve.
Q: The devices he created or helped create at Apple are a huge part of his legacy right now. But technology changes so fast that soon even the most amazing of them will be obsolete. Will his accomplishments seem so amazing 20 or 30 years down the road?
A: I think he will be judged by how well his greatest creation, Apple the company, fares. Devices come and go. The question is, can you continually reinvent the future by connecting artistry with great engineering? And I think at the moment, the people at Apple who trained under him can keep that legacy alive, just as the people who trained under Walt Disney could do it.
Q: Did the public reaction to his passing surprise you?
A: The emotion surprised me, but it’s connected to the emotion inherent in the products he made. He knew how to make a connection. I can’t imagine any other business leader provoking this outpouring upon their death. I just think people felt that Steve Jobs was able to create things that showed he had an understanding of our desires.
Q: In the book, you compare him to Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, and say he’ll be the sort of business leader who will be remembered 100 years from now. But you’ve also written biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein, and you don’t invoke their names. Jobs doesn’t belong in that pantheon?
A: I think he’s very much like Benjamin Franklin in being inventive. Franklin knew how to tie imaginative ideas to practical products—the lightning rod being the best example. And he was always curious, always driven. As for Einstein, he’s in a different quantum orbit. He was the ultimate person who knew how to think different, to use the words in Steve’s famous advertising campaign.
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In conversation: Alison Gopnik
By Kate Fillion - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 at 6:00 AM - 0 Comments
On what’s wrong with the way we teach, and how a year out of university changed her son’s life
Photograph by Max Whittaker
Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley. A prolific researcher and author who specializes in cognitive development, her most recent book is The Philosophical Baby: What children’s minds tell us about love, truth and the meaning of life.
Q: What’s the traditional approach to learning at a university, and how does it square with what experts know about how people learn?
A: The traditional way of thinking about learning at a university is: there’s somebody who’s a teacher, who actually has some amount of knowledge, and their job is figuring out a way of communicating that knowledge. That’s literally a medieval model; it comes from the days when there weren’t a lot of printed books around, so someone read the book and explained it to everybody else. That’s our model for what university education, and for that matter high school education, ought to be like. It’s not a model that anybody’s ever found any independent evidence for.
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In conversation: Brendan Shanahan
By Jonathon Gatehouse - Friday, October 21, 2011 at 8:10 AM - 9 Comments
On the future of fighting, making disciplinary videos and getting dissed by Don Cherry
Steve Simon/Maclean's
In 21 NHL seasons as a player, winning three Stanley Cups and an Olympic Gold, he always made things happen on the ice. But now Brendan Shanahan is out to change the game itself. As the league’s new senior vice-president of player safety and hockey operations, the 42-year-old is charged with both enforcing and rethinking the rule book. And he’s drawing a lot of heat from the game’s “purists.”
Q: The NHL season has just started and already you’re under fire. Were you surprised that the honeymoon was so short?
A: I knew that it was a controversial position, but it’s an endeavour I believe in. There’ll always be those who think every decision is too much, and there will be those who think every decision is too little. I try to keep my focus on the goal: keeping hockey physical and entertaining and passionate. But I think it can also be safer. And I think the players are already showing their ability to adapt.
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On Homer, fine-tuning ‘The Iliad’ and being the rock star of translators
By Jessica Allen - Wednesday, October 19, 2011 at 11:30 AM - 1 Comment
Stephen Mitchell in conversation with Jessica Allen
Photograph by Stephaine Noritz
He Knows Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French, German, Italian and Danish. And his progressive translations include Gilgamesh and The Gospel According to Jesus. Now Stephen Mitchell takes on Homer’s The Iliad—and he cuts about 1,100 lines along the way.
Q: Although there hasn’t been a major new translation of The Iliad in 15 years, there are about 200 in existence—six alone in the previous decade. Did you think the time was right for a new one?
A: Well, it was the right time for me. I didn’t think of anybody else. I just wanted to spend a few years with the vast mind of Homer. I never think of that sort of thing when I begin a project: I have a sense that something is right and I just plunge into it. And I was lucky enough to have had that sense after the very great M.L. West edition was published [in Greek], so I had an advantage over previous translators who were working from the 1902 Greek Oxford Classical Texts. It’s a very defective edition in many ways.
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On noisy hospitals and ‘alarm fatigue’
By Kate Lunau - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 at 11:40 AM - 1 Comment
How all those bells interfere with sleep and healing
Colin O'Connor/Maclean's
Several patient deaths in the U.S. have been attributed to “alarm fatigue,” after overworked medical staff failed to respond to an alarm in time. Acoustics expert , provost of McMaster University and a mechanical engineer by training, Ilene Busch-Vishniac spoke to Maclean’s from Washington, where she was preparing to attend a conference addressing the topic.
Q: What is alarm fatigue?
A: Alarms are meant to alert you, and if they’re constantly going off [the idea is that] you could become somewhat blasé. Many of my peers suspect that medical staff are tuning them out, but I’ve seen no evidence of that in the literature. What is certainly true is that there are so many alarms going off, it is not physically possible for medical staff to respond to all of them as quickly as we would like. Alarms will occasionally go unanswered, but that could simply be because noise in the hospital is so loud you literally couldn’t hear the alarm—or it could be that at the moment the alarm was going off, there were 70 others going off.
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In conversation: Kevin O’Leary
By Colin Campbell - Wednesday, October 5, 2011 at 10:50 AM - 2 Comments
The ‘Dragon’s Den’ star on his unconventional childhood and what Steve Jobs is really like
Jessica Darmanin/Maclean's
Before becoming one of the star investors on CBC’s Dragons’ Den and ABC’s Shark Tank, Kevin O’Leary founded the software firm SoftKey, which later became The Learning Company and merged with Mattel in a deal worth nearly $4 billion. He now heads the investment firm O’Leary Funds and also co-hosts CBC’s The Lang & O’Leary Exchange. His new memoir Cold Hard Truth hit shelves last week.
Q: You offer a lot of lessons in your book about how to succeed in business. Can entrepreneurialism be taught?
A: I actually think being an entrepreneur is a state of mind. If you’re going to be an entrepreneur, my thesis is that you have to sacrifice everything for some period in your life to be successful. You have to be myopic and completely focused and unbalanced in every way. Once you achieve success, you’re free to do whatever you like.
Q: You write about being steered into business by your stepfather and mother.
A: Well, my mom’s attitude was, you’re going to find your own path, and life is serendipitous. She wasn’t as rigorous and hardcore as my dad, who looked at me one day and said, “You’re going to amount to nothing. All you do is party and you want to be a photographer. That’s the most competitive industry on Earth. You’re not that good.” The guy was giving me the truth: you should go back to school and at least get some tools.
Q: There are professional photographers. You could have pursued that.
A: I wanted to do that. I wanted to go to Ryerson. His thesis was: what’s your competitive advantage? What’s your difference? I’ve met with and worked with many photographers now, and I realize that it’s a brutally competitive market and they are really, really good. I honestly don’t think that I have that.
Q: This was your stepdad. Your biological father you describe as being a real salesman. Do you think you inherited that from him?
A: I do. I noticed the other day in a photo of him with his arms stretched in a position I do a lot; it looks just like I do. He died when I was seven. But I remember him. He was a classic Irish partier. A very kind man but also a real renegade.
Q: He lived hard?
A: Very hard. It’s what those Irish guys did. My mother divorced him right before he died and I think he died with a broken heart.
Q: What do you think he would have made of Dragons’ Den?
A: He would have been proud of me. He really missed a lot of life. I think he drank himself to death. It’s something I’m very cognizant of.
I was driving a couple of years ago and Peter Munk, the chairman of Barrick Gold, calls me and says, “Did you know that I came over on a boat with your father from Ireland? He was my roommate.”
Q: Get out of here.
A: No I’m serious. He said, “I just wanted to call you and let you know that he was a great guy.” It was a remarkable moment.
Q: What about your mother? Did she have a chance to see any early episodes of you on television?
A: She did and she was always fascinated by television. She actually enjoyed Lang & O’Leary more than anything. She really respected Amanda.
Q: Your mom factors heavily in your book . . .
A: She was an amazing woman and went through a lot of hardship, but also gave me tremendous guidance and support. She had an investment philosophy that I didn’t appreciate then but I do now. She said, never invest in anything that doesn’t have yield. When she died three years ago, I was executor of her estate and I realized she had every single dime she’d ever made.
Q: That’s still your investment philosophy today.
A: And it works! It really works.
Q: She was a working mom too, right?
A: A working mom. Her father owned [a clothing factory] but his philosophy was that the daughters all had to work on the sewing line. She was the boss’s daughter but not treated differently than anybody else. That’s how I treat my kids, too. When I fly over to see my dad in Geneva, my son has to sit in the back of the bus because I say to him, you have no money. You can’t afford to sit in first class. It’s a good lesson. He gets it. It makes him mad.
Q: Your mom later became the CEO of the family company.
A: It was tough. I had a German nanny. My dad was gone. I had dyslexia.
Q: You write in your book, “Money is the lifeblood of family.” Explain that.
A: Unfortunately it’s the truth. You can say family can be held together by love, but the truth is if there’s no capital there you get into a very bad place. Money puts tremendous pressures on relationships if you don’t have any.
Q: But your parents would have loved you if they were broke and living in a shack, right?
A: Yeah, but you know . . . money tears families apart for lack of, and for too much. It’s a very powerful force and you have to understand it and respect it.
Q: People would probably be surprised to hear about your whirlwind childhood—living in Cambodia, where your stepdad worked for the UN, going to military college in Quebec. Was that hard?
A: It was hard. I think back and think I missed something. But at the same time it gave me an appreciation of the world. I own real estate in Cambodia because I know it’s a great place for real estate. No one else knows—but I lived there for two years and I’ve been back.
Q: What did you learn at military college?
A: The discipline of getting up at 4:30 in the morning.
Q: Do you still do that?
A: I do. I get up between 4:30 and 6:30 every day.
Q: Were you a popular kid?
A: I had good friends. What’s happened to me over time is my best friends are the ones I’ve been to war with in business. I make friends inside a company and I stay friends with them the rest of my life.
Q: In one of your early endeavours you worked in TV production, including on Don Cherry’s Grapevine, a half-hour interview show. What was that like?
A: I owned that format. I owned Special Event Television with two partners. The first time I made money was selling Don Cherry’s Grapevine to his son.
Q: Do you channel Don Cherry when you’re on TV now?
A: I really respect Don. When you go on television it’s because you’re trying to create something people watch. He’s very flamboyant, entertaining and I think he taught me a lot about that.
Q: On TV you have a reputation as being the mean guy. You have a story about one man who came up to you in an airport washroom after seeing you on Dragons’ Den and called you an asshole. You’ve said this kind of stuff doesn’t bother you.
A: It doesn’t bother me at all.
Q: It’s hard to believe. Everybody wants to be liked.
A: Here’s why I know I’m right about this. The reason he said that is that I’m simply telling the truth. The one thing about money is you have to tell the truth about it. It’s the only metric in life where there’s no grey. You either make money or you lose money.
Q: I think you’ve described telling someone their idea stinks as “exhilarating.”
A: Because we’ve gone through this journey together; we’ve explored an idea and we’ve come to the right conclusion: it’s stupid. That’s a good outcome. I’m not trying to make friends, I’m trying to make money. My whole theme is just tell the truth.
Q: Let’s talk about The Learning Company, which you sold to Mattel in what turned out to be an epically bad merger.
A: You know, what’s interesting is the company is back [under new ownership] with all the same brands and doing very well. I think Mattel squandered a fantastic asset. One of the big motivations in writing this book was to set right what actually happened after they acquired the company. In my mind I’ve cleared the record.
Q: Obviously you’ve heard all the criticism: that TLC wasn’t profitable, that Mattel was somehow deceived.
A: Of course, if any of that were true it would have come out in the litigation. None of it was. They had forensic accountants tear our books apart for two years.
Q: You talk about how a culture clash between your software firm and a big bureaucratic toy maker ruined what could have been a good deal. The failure must have really bothered you.
A: It made me crazy. I was out of my mind unhappy.
Q: You and the CEO of Mattel, Jill Barad, both lost your jobs.
A: Well, I mean, I wasn’t happy being an employee anyway. I had a three-year non-compete. It was the most miserable time of my life. I was making the largest salary I had ever made and I wasn’t allowed to work.
Q: You once managed to get a meeting with Steve Jobs, where you asked him to pay TLC to keep carrying Mac-compatible software. What was he like?
A: He was so abusive! Toughest guy I ever met. We were in the boardroom at Apple and he went into a diatribe like I had never heard before. But we eventually did a lot of business with Apple. He’s a tough guy. Maybe that’s why it works. And hey, there’s an asshole!
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Women don’t have to push so much
By Kate Fillion - Monday, September 26, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 10 Comments
Dr. Aaron Caughey on labour and how epidurals changed childbirth
Photography by Jean-Marc Giboux/Getty Images
Dr. Aaron Caughey is the chairman of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Oregon Health and Sciences University, director of its Center for Women’s Health, and a researcher with an interest in diabetes in pregnancy. He recently addressed the pushing question at the Birth World Congress in Chicago.
Q: What attracted you to obstetrics?
A: I’m a labour-floor junkie. As a third-year medical student doing an obstetrics rotation, it was immediate for me, like a crush. The process of birth, the intensity of the experience, the potential for it to be many people’s best days mixed with a small percentage of people’s worst days, and the challenge of how to make the outcomes better—it’s extremely compelling.
Q: Let’s start with a brief refresher course on labour.
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On the evils of wheat
By Kate Fillion - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 at 9:40 AM - 188 Comments
Dr. William Davis on why it is so addictive, and how shunning it will make you skinny
Jean-Marc Giboux/Getty Images
William Davis, a preventive cardiologist who practises in Milwaukee, Wis., argues in his new book Wheat Belly that wheat is bad for your health—so bad that it should carry a surgeon general’s warning.
Q: You say the crux of the problem with wheat is that the stuff we eat today has been genetically altered. How is it different than the wheat our grandparents ate?
A: First of all, it looks different. If you held up a conventional wheat plant from 50 years ago against a modern, high-yield dwarf wheat plant, you would see that today’s plant is about 2½ feet shorter. It’s stockier, so it can support a much heavier seedbed, and it grows much faster. The great irony here is that the term “genetic modification” refers to the actual insertion or deletion of a gene, and that’s not what’s happened with wheat. Instead, the plant has been hybridized and crossbred to make it resistant to drought and fungi, and to vastly increase yield per acre. Agricultural geneticists have shown that wheat proteins undergo structural change with hybridization, and that the hybrid contains proteins that are found in neither parent plant. Now, it shouldn’t be the case that every single new agricultural hybrid has to be checked and tested, that would be absurd. But we’ve created thousands of what I call Frankengrains over the past 50 years, using pretty extreme techniques, and their safety for human consumption has never been tested or even questioned.
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In conversation: Conrad Black
By Kenneth Whyte - Monday, September 12, 2011 at 10:25 AM - 5 Comments
On scrubbing showers, navigating the prison economy and getting used to sleeping alone
Photograph by Steve Simon
Q: I want to go back to something near the start of your troubles. Peter C. Newman predicted that you would get 15 years in jail, that you would be raped in prison, and that your wife Barbara Amiel would leave you and return to London for her fifth husband. Did he hit the mark on any of that?
A: No, he was rather wide of the mark on all of those. He missed completely on the last two. Where I was—there is practically no violence in this particular prison, and there certainly wasn’t anywhere around me or with anyone that I dealt with. The only homosexual activity is voluntary, and however much of it there is, it isn’t oppressive, and is not otherwise unconsensual. But on the first point, as you know there were 17 counts and four of them were not proceeded with; nine were rejected by the jurors, and the remaining four were vacated unanimously by the U.S. Supreme Court. Two of them were spuriously retrieved by the appellant panel that the Supreme Court excoriated, but in the perverse American manner had been sent back to the same panel for the assessment of the gravity of their own errors. So the grand total that I ultimately will have served is three years, even though anyone reading the relevant transcripts and filings can see that nobody amongst my co-defendants—including myself—broke any laws at all, and none of us would have dreamt of such a thing.
Q: You admit in the book to having missed a shift in the zeitgeist toward higher standards of corporate governance, and I was wondering if that was something you missed as much as didn’t agree with.
A: Well, the two I’m afraid run somewhat together. We had a very long and unbroken record—or practically unbroken—of taking distressed properties and fixing them up, both in quality and in profit level, and that was what our business was, producing quality products profitably. So my objection was this attempt to shunt the discussion with the shareholders into these issues of secondary relevance. On the other hand I must admit—as I did admit in my book—that I should have been more aware of how much shareholder and financial community and financial press attention was at that time already being focused on things like that.
Q: You were extremely worried during this time—it comes out in the book—about your personal financial position. It was the key to your survival and your ability to fight. I had no idea that your access to your wealth really was what was keeping you afloat.
A: Yes. Well, you see, the way the system works is that there are freezes on any trades in securities in companies under the kind of scrutiny that ours were, so you couldn’t realize on that if you wanted to. And then because of the publicity, I couldn’t find anyone to whom I could sell anything, other than a bottom-feeder or a vulture who would try to take advantage of me. All of a sudden, for my purposes, if I was trying to realize any money, nothing had much value, you see? Now, I managed to get ’round that eventually, but it requires a lot of setting things up carefully and moving with less speed and less liquidity than would normally be available, and yet the legal profession in these kinds of things is terribly expensive.
Q: On that note, tell me about Brendan Sullivan.
A: [He was] chairman of the Washington law firm Williams & Conway, and they’ve had a great many famous cases, including the defence of [Bill] Clinton in his impeachment case, and the civil complaints of the Democratic party after the Watergate affair.
Q: And you hired him, paid him about $9 million in fees, and in the end didn’t get a hell of a lot in return for it.
A: I’m afraid that is substantially true.
Q: But how could he charge you so much without really producing anything? He didn’t take your case in the end, did he?
A: No. No, he did not. He’d requested a large retainer of at least $15 million, and in order to be sure that I had that cash ready I sold the co-operative unit that I owned in New York City on Park Avenue. I sold it at quite a respectable profit, and the government was aware of that through, in fact, illegal telephone intercept, as the devices were all discovered when we moved the furniture out of the apartment. Then they, on the basis of a completely spurious FBI affidavit, they represented that I had paid an insufficient amount of money to the company—the company I was chairman of—to buy this apartment. But they got an ex parte proceeding in which a magistrate authorized the seizure of the proceeds of the sale with no notice to me. So the closing came, my counsel were there with the buyer’s counsel, and the FBI did an elephant walk through the room, picked up the cheque. The buyer had my apartment, the government had my money, and I didn’t have anything. And they knew perfectly well that would prevent me paying the retainer to Brendan Sullivan promptly.
Q: Normally I wouldn’t ask somebody about their personal financial position, but you wrote about it, so I was surprised at two or three things. One, most of your assets were in real estate. Why?
A: The largest asset by far was the control position in the company we directed, but that was frozen, and it rapidly deteriorated in value as these vandals with court protection destroyed the companies, wiping out $2 billion of shareholder value. Only about 15 per cent of that was mine.
CLICK HERE TO READ AN EXCERPT FROM CONRAD BLACK’S NEW BOOK, A MATTER OF PRINCIPLE
Q: Is it common for people who build their own companies to have most of their wealth invested in those companies?
A: Yeah, sure, it’s quite common. When people are controlling shareholders that’s often how things are.
Q: At one point in this whole mess, because of your inability to access your wealth you were down to your last hundred thousand dollars. Had you ever, in your adult life, been that strapped before?
A: No. No, and not my last hundred thousand dollars in terms of assets, but everything had to be paid right away. You had no access to credit other than loan sharks, so it was a constant battle to keep enough liquid money around, to pay counsel and, since I had some fairly large homes, they did require some money to operate them. I got through it all, you know. I’m not a poor person today. I certainly am a less well-to-do person than I was, but it’s all right, it’s only money and I can build back from where I am if that’s what I want to do.
Q: By most people’s standards you’re still a wealthy man.
A: By the standards of contemporary fortunes I was never a tremendously wealthy man at the best of times, but I was a wealthy man and I am a less wealthy man now.
Q: So we go through the trial, most of the government’s case is knocked away, but you are convicted on three charges of fraud and one of obstruction of justice, and the latter—the obstruction charge—centres around that video of you coming out of your office with boxes, caught on a security camera, looking furtive, red-handed. What was going on there?
A: The famous picture of my pointing at the camera was that I was saying to my assistant and my driver that I certainly wanted to make sure this was all captured on film because I didn’t want any suggestion of anything surreptitious happening. Even though I technically owned the building where I had had my office for 27 years, one of the Toronto courts said I had to leave the building. We had six business days left, my assistant put some things in boxes, and had asked them to be moved, and then there was an intervention asking that they not be moved from the representative of the court-appointed inspector. So when I arrived later on in the day I spoke to the acting president of the company who said, “That’s fine to move it,” after questioning my assistant about the contents. I knew nothing about the contents, I just asked her if they contravened the order that we were under, and they didn’t. And in fact, everything in there was either totally personal or it was business-related and had already been handed over in complete compliance to five different subpoenas for documents from the United States. Every page we had in there had already been copied and sent away, and so it was a totally innocuous act.
Q: How would you explain, then, the court’s logic convicting you?
A: I think even the defence counsel who represented me on that particular item acknowledged they could have put up a better defence. The film, as you say—I mean, you’ve described it yourself, I suppose, quite accurately—that I appeared to be furtive and red-handed. And the jurors, as they acknowledged in post-trial interviews, did not always follow the judge’s instruction to be sure beyond a reasonable doubt. They got to the point, where one of the jurors was told by a relative that the speculation in the press was that they were just a bunch of yokels who would never be able to reach a verdict in such a complicated case, and this juror said, “So we really got to reach a verdict.”
Q: Tell me what it was like walking into prison for the first time.
A: Well, by the time it finally happened, my attitude was, “This has gone on so long and been so horrifying it can’t be worse than what’s happening now.” So to the extent that it is apparently survivable, I can start to develop a comfort level that I will in fact survive it and have a life after this appalling nightmare. And I had spoken with someone who had been in that particular facility, a low-security prison, who assured me there was no violence other than the occasional scuffles between people that didn’t amount to much and just occurred because individuals were ill-tempered, and that it, while sometimes quite tedious, was eminently survivable.
Q: What does it mean to be processed?
A: You, first of all, have to take off all your clothes and you’re searched . . .
Q: Thoroughly searched.
A: Thorough search, yeah. Intrusively, I think is the usual description. Then you answer medical questions and a lot of other questions, and they give you a card with your number on it, they issue some sort of basic clothing, and then they tell you where you’re supposed to go to live and approximately how to get there.
Q: And you were never handcuffed at any time during this, were you? I don’t ever remember you being in those pictures that you see on TV.
A: No. I was handcuffed when there was a move—that proved to be mistaken—to move me to another location because they thought I was being called as a witness in a civil proceeding in which I was in fact the plaintiff . . . fortunately the judge’s order arrived before I had to get on the bus, but in the meantime you have that very elaborate form of having manacles on your feet—chains, you know—as well as being handcuffed.
Q: What’s that sensation like?
A: It’s interesting in that it is so restrictive and demeaning, you feel intensely vulnerable. I knew that they were making a mistake and—incompetent though the Bureau of Prisons often is—this would come to light and it wouldn’t go very far, so I could look at it in a more relaxed manner than I would if I thought I would have to travel across the country in that condition.
Q: I don’t want to suggest that the time at Coleman was leisurely, but you weren’t busting big rocks into little rocks. I was kind of surprised at how much free time you had.
A: I don’t think in federal prisons in the U.S. you have them out breaking stones, I think that may be state prisons. In a low-security federal prison, everybody is supposed to have a job. In my case, some people in the library, who were aware of the book on [Franklin Delano] Roosevelt that I had written, got the head of the education section to engage me as a tutor, and I had a very satisfying job there. I worked quite hard at it.
Q: And you write in the book about your enormous pride in some of the progress that your students made.
A: Enormous in the sense of pride in them, not in myself.
Q: Yes.
A: This is true. I mean, some of them were very surly and terribly under-educated in formal terms when we started. Once they could see that there was a purpose to it, and that it was a way of getting something useful out of this unpleasant experience, they applied themselves. It was very heartening to see how hard they worked, how people who had been told all their lives they couldn’t possibly succeed at anything were so excited—and justly excited—because it was a great achievement for them.
Q: On one occasion you speak about cleaning a shower stall, and you attracted a crowd. What was going on there?
A: Well, apparently I was slightly late leaving in the morning, so the counsellor said, “All right, well then you can’t leave for an hour,” which is when the next opportunity was, “and so in the meantime you go and work with the men in the shower room.” And so I cleaned the shower stall that I normally used, and I cleaned it very thoroughly. And I didn’t attract the audience in the sense of there was any great merit to how I did it—I mean, cleaning a shower stall is an important activity but not an especially stylish one—but the counsellor and some of his chums who were correctional officers thought it was so uproariously humorous that a man of my alleged means would be cleaning a shower stall that they turned it into a spectator sport. I must say it was all quite good-natured, it wasn’t nasty.
Q: And you gave them a good show?
A: No one disputed that the stall was clean!
Q: How sophisticated is the economy within the prison? I imagine, especially in the kind of facility that you were in, that there are some pretty cagey operators.
A: Extremely so. It’s very sophisticated in the sense that you have tremendously talented craftsmen. I mean, if there’s a problem with your eyeglasses, or a problem with your radio, there are people who can fix them. And it’s also sophisticated in the upper ranges of what you might want in terms of consumer value, because there is some degree of smuggling there, and because all inmates who receive visitors are strip-searched at the end of the visit, really none of the smuggling is through prisoners’ families or other visitors, it’s all through corrupted correctional officers. If you really wanted to, you could get a cellphone—which is forbidden. You could get a bottle of good whisky—which is forbidden. Now, I never touched any of that because I conducted my battle with the U.S. authorities and this unjust prosecution entirely through the courts, and the last thing in the world I wanted was any needless dispute with the officials of the Bureau of Prisons.
Q: What was the worst moment for you in prison?
A: The worst was when the Court of Appeal in Chicago so cavalierly treated our case. We had a very strong appeal, as was ultimately demonstrated by the Supreme Court of the United States, and the chairman of the appellant panel would not allow my counsel to finish a sentence. It was the most disgraceful thing I have seen in a court in a serious country. I didn’t actually see it, but I heard the audio and I read the transcript. And it reminded me—not to be tendentious here—but it reminded me of these news films of the Nazi People’s Court after the attempt on Hitler’s life in July of 1944, where Judge Freisler shouted at the prisoner. It was a fantastic spectacle in what is generally a distinguished jurisdiction in Chicago and it was obvious that we had no chance in that court.
Q: Through the whole of this process, Conrad, you had some friends who left you and some who stuck beside you. I’m just going to give you some names. Henry Kissinger.
A: I’ve had a great reconciliation with him. I’d been here in New York for four months, and he went to some lengths to see me, and I told him what my objections were to what he’d done, and he . . .
Q: He failed to defend you after having called you on several occasions an indispensable pillar of his existence, I think that was the phrase.
A: Pillar of my life, but he said that and wrote that a number of times. And in fairness, unknown to me he wrote that to the trial judge. I didn’t ask him to write a letter, and I did not know until years later that he did write a letter.
Q: So you say in the book that his failure to stand up for you was a wound that wouldn’t heal. That’s no longer the case?
A: No. In fact I altered the wording in the final version of the book. I did say the litmus test was if he thought I had committed crimes, and he said immediately, “I do not think you’ve committed crimes, and I never did.” And I said, “In that case I suggest that we put it all behind us and never speak of it again,” and that’s what’s happened. I see him quite often. I’m having dinner with him tomorrow.
Q: Elton John continued to be a great friend.
A: Magnificent, absolutely magnificent.
Q: David Radler was an associate for more than a quarter century, and then he turns on you and gives evidence against you. Surely you had to know what he was capable of.
A: So one would think, and I reproach myself for not having known. But I must say, in his defence, that for almost all of that time there was never the slightest sign that he was capable of either committing illegalities himself or inventing untruths to level against his associates as part of an activity to try and transfer blame from himself to others in order to get a reduced sentence for himself.
Q: Rupert Murdoch: do you still consider him the greatest media proprietor of all time, given his recent troubles?
A: Yes, but I’ve made it clear that my admiration for his talents as a media proprietor are not on either the standards that he has in presenting news or his own ethics. I was referring to his tremendous boldness in breaking the primitive print unions in Britain, and in breaking the triopoly of the three American television networks, and vertically integrating a film studio with a television network and then being a pioneer in satellite television. But he’s always been a tabloid man, he personally is a complete cynic. I’ve often said that his political philosophy is in that cartoon show that his company produces, The Simpsons. I mean, the people are idiots and all politicians are crooks, and that’s how Rupert sees the world.
Q: Have you changed as a result of all of this? What has changed about Conrad Black?
A: I’m not the best person to judge. It is fair to say very few people would go through as prolonged and arduous an experience as this without changing in some way, and I believe that I probably have. I hope that I have a greater recognition about the numbers and dire conditions of disadvantaged people even in a rich country like the United States. I’m of course much more aware of how imperfectly the justice system functions.
Q: Do you feel remorse about anything you yourself did?
A: Well, I feel remorse about anything I did that helped bring this upon me. I certainly feel no remorse at all about the honesty of what I did, because I didn’t do anything dishonest. I have remorse about any errors that I made that contributed to the vaporization of $2 billion of shareholders’ equity, 85 per cent in the hands of average people throughout the United States and Canada.
Q: Less than a year from now you will be a free man. What is the next act?
A: Well, one of the few positive results of this difficult time is that my career as a writer has flourished. I was fortunate to be in a prison where there was email access so I could file columns for the National Post, the National Review in the United States, and various publications in other countries. I often wrote book reviews, including of your book about William Randolph Hearst, and so I hope to go on with that.
Q: It’s a hard way to make a living.
A: I wasn’t suggesting I had to do it for a living, although I think I could get a fairly respectable income out of it, but in the terms you mean I think I shall return to being an investor. I don’t want to say this in a way that’s inappropriate, but I had some success in that field and I think it can be done in a way that’s completely private, totally unobtrusive, and will furnish quite a decent living.
Q: And do you expect to return to Canada? Do you want to return to Canada?
A: I want to divide my time between Canada and Great Britain, but I certainly would like to come to Canada if only as a temporary resident.
Q: When you were in prison, what was the one material thing you missed most?
A: Probably good food, but I have to emphasize that far above material things was the companionship of my wife. There is no substitute, in the middle of the night, for moving your knee and hitting a cinderblock wall instead of connecting with a person you’re happy to share the bed with. I don’t mean that in a prurient sense, it’s just something that one feels acutely.
Q: How is the food in prison?
A: It’s the lower end of institutional food. There are microwaves in the units and you can buy food from the commissary and put together something a little better in the microwaves, if you want to. What’s offered in the dining hall is certainly enough to keep body and soul together, but it’s not very tasty.
Q: Is that what you spent your stamps on?
A: No, we had—to use Lenin’s phrase—a division of labour: I would do some things for some of the inmates, and in return they would do some things for me, and there were better cooks in that place than I am.
Q: Conrad Black, thanks very much, and good luck with the rest of your journey.
A: Thank you so much, Ken.
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In conversation: David Chilton
By Chris Sorensen - Wednesday, September 7, 2011 at 11:10 AM - 0 Comments
On the illusion of wealth, and why so many are so far behind in saving for retirement
Andrew Tolson/Maclean's
In 1989, David Chilton published The Wealthy Barber, a seminal book on money, focusing on three people in their 20s who visit Roy, a barber, for lessons on financial planning. It went on to sell more than two million copies, making it one of the bestselling Canadian books of all time. Now, more than 20 years later, and in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the 49-year-old has released the long-awaited follow-up: The Wealthy Barber Returns, which hits bookshelves this week.
Q: How old were you when you first published The Wealthy Barber?
A: I was 25 when I started writing it and 27 when it came out. I was very lucky. I really was. Interest rates had just started heading on a steady path downward and that was really important because it made people realize they couldn’t just rely on GICs [guaranteed investment certificates], they had to start looking for other investments. And that meant they needed some knowledge. Also, there was almost no competition. When The Wealthy Barber came out, there were only two other Canadian personal finance books in the marketplace. Now there are hundreds.
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In conversation: Jane Fonda
By Kate Fillion - Wednesday, August 24, 2011 at 9:35 AM - 1 Comment
On getting older and enjoying life more, why sex fascinates her, and her fear of intimacy
Photo by Jemal Countess/Getty Images
Jane Fonda—Oscar and Emmy winner, political activist, workout guru, bestselling author, and philanthropist dedicated to preventing teen pregnancy—has a new cause: revolutionizing the way we view aging. In Prime Time, she explains how and why life’s “third act” is (or could be) better than ever.
Q: Why do you call life post-60 “prime time”?
A: Most of the time, contrary to popular opinion, it’s happier, less stressful, you have fewer hostile emotions. That’s been the case with me, and studies show this is true for most people, whether they’re rich or poor—though rich helps!—men, women, married, single.
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On the need to restart the debate on assisted suicide
By Ken MacQueen - Wednesday, August 17, 2011 at 9:33 AM - 4 Comments
Lee Carter and Hollis Johnson discuss death and chocolate in a Swiss clinic
Photographs by Simon Hayter
On Jab. 15, 2010, Kathleen (Kay) Carter of North Vancouver had a date with death, an event she’d been seeking for months. She was 89 years old and nearly paralyzed by spinal stenosis. She made a last journey to Dignitas, a Swiss clinic devoted to assisted dying, accompanied by her daughter Lee Carter, Lee’s husband, Hollis Johnson, and other family. There, she drank a lethal drug, nibbled on a Swiss chocolate and drifted off to death. Her legacy is a renewed debate on the right to die. Carter and Johnson are now part of a challenge to the law prohibiting assisted suicide. It will be heard in the B.C. Supreme Court in November.
Q: Lee, tell me about Kay Carter, your mother.
LC: She was a fiercely independent person. She was well-read. She was interested in politics, social issues. She went to university and spent one year teaching elementary school in White Rock, B.C. And then she started having children, and had seven. There was no room for a job. She was married to my dad, Ron Carter, until he died in his mid-60s.
Q: In 2008, she was diagnosed with spinal stenosis. What did it mean to her quality of life?
LC: Basically, it’s to do with the [degenerating] spinal cord. You begin to lose your extremities, the ability to use your hands, your feet and eventually your legs. When she was diagnosed, it was hard to use her arms. She knew something was wrong. She would have been around 86 or 87.
HJ: I think the prognosis was particularly horrifying for her. The doctor said at some point, “You’ll be completely paralyzed, and just be on a gurney, and all of your needs will have to be attended to by others.” For her to lose that mobility was really terrifying.Q: At what point did she decide she wanted to end her life?
LC: She woke up in the middle of the night [in July 2009] and said, “I’ve got it. I know what I want to do. I want to go overseas. Over there they can allow me to die with dignity.”
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The benefits of mental illness
By Brian Bethune - Tuesday, August 9, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 18 Comments
Brian Bethune in conversation with Nassir Ghaemi
Photographs by Jodi Hilton/Getty Images
NASSIR GHAEMI is a physician and professor of psychiatry at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston. In A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Health, he argues that in times of crisis, a lifetime of sanity can be a serious liability for political and military leaders, while the lessons and legacy of madness have proven invaluable.
Q: To put your counterintuitive thesis in a nutshell, would it be that too much of anything, including normality, is a bad thing?
A: You could put it that way. I would add that mentally normal leaders, who often have enormous success in normal times, often do not have the personal resources to cope with crisis change. But those who have struggled with mental illness—not outright psychosis or delusions, but the common mental illnesses of bipolarism or depression—have often developed just the traits that crisis leaders need and demonstrate: realism, resilience, creativity and empathy.
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Peter Munk: in conversation
By Kenneth Whyte - Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 3 Comments
On immigrant dreams, the importance of failure and why the future belongs to Canada
Aaron Harris/Bloomberg/Getty Images
Peter Munk, the founder and chair of Barrick Gold, the world’s biggest gold miner, found a land of opportunity when he arrived in Canada as a teenager after he fled Nazi-occupied Hungary. But the 83-year-old businessman is convinced the country’s brightest days may still lie ahead. As the appetite for raw materials skyrockets in China, India and other developing countries, he argues that Canada has a rare, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to establish itself as the world’s next big financial sector, rivalling the dominance of London and New York.
Q: Let’s talk first about your earliest impressions of Canada as an immigrant boy.
A: That day I arrived, it was a miserable, rainy day in early March ’48. It was like, terra incognita, like going to Mars. I know it sounds moronic.
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In conversation: Shawn Atleo
By Ken MacQueen - Wednesday, July 20, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 8 Comments
On moving beyond residential schools, overcoming cynicism and trusting the Tories
Photograph by Simon Hayter
AFTER TWO YEARS as national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, Shawn Atleo is cautiously optimistic about the relationship he is forging with Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government. On Tuesday, at the assembly’s annual meeting in Moncton, N.B., he proposed replacing the federal Aboriginal Affairs Department with a system that allows bands more autonomy and lessens the heavy federal intervention required under the Indian Act. “The patterns of the past have to be essentially smashed,” he told Maclean’s. Atleo, a hereditary chief in the tiny B.C. island community of Ahousaht, reads vindication in the recent report by now-retired auditor general Sheila Fraser. It warns, as Atleo and successive national chiefs have said, that the quality of life on reserves is worsening and the existing system of financing and accountability must be overhauled.
Q: The last time we spoke, you called your home community of Ahousaht a microcosm of First Nations across the country. So, how is Ahousaht faring?
A: Oh, it has its struggles, to be frank. They’re working on them, and we’ve got a new generation of leadership coming on.
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David McCullough in conversation with Kenneth Whyte
By Kenneth Whyte - Monday, July 11, 2011 at 9:35 AM - 0 Comments
On presidents who were failures, the trouble with historians, and how to tell a story
Photographs by Cole Garside
Historian David McCullough has won the Pulitzer Prize twice, for his biographies of John Adams and Harry Truman. His new book, The Greater Journey, is about high-achieving Americans in Paris between 1830 and 1900, and how they changed the world.
Q: This should be easy. I’ve only got one question. How do you tell a story?
A: I grew up with stories. My father was a wonderful storyteller. He enjoyed the person he was telling the story about, some character who did something odd or had figures of speech. He was a salesman and he met all kinds of people, from going down into coal mines to calling on the executives of the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company. I grew up with three brothers, and we all loved the stories of days past when there had been floods or fires or some adventure that he’d been on or knew about. I’m not quoting exactly, but E.M. Forster said, “If I tell you the king died and then the queen died, that’s a sequence of events. If I tell you the king died and the queen died of grief, that’s a story.” So it’s understanding the human equations involved, and I particularly have always liked plays, movies, novels where plot derives from character rather than outside forces. All my books, not just this one, are about a journey.
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How he sees Canada’s role in the world and where he wants to take the country
By Kenneth Whyte - Thursday, July 7, 2011 at 1:30 PM - 235 Comments
Prime minister Stephen Harper in conversation with Kenneth Whyte
Photographs by Blair Gable
Q: Let’s start with election night. Was it fun?
A: It’s always fun when you win.
Q: Did you take a moment to enjoy it?
A: Yeah. Look, as I think you know, we were pretty confident we were going to win, frankly, from the outset—the question was the margin—and we were feeling pretty good in the days leading up to it. I suppose, yeah, it was exciting that night. But you’re also coming off the end of a long, gruelling campaign, so there’s also a sense of relief and a sense of exhaustion all wrapped up together.
Q: If you’re not going to stop and enjoy that one, what are you going to stop for?
A: I did enjoy it. We have to enjoy things. These guys—my staff—probably enjoyed it more than I did. I’m always thinking. The next task is almost immediately on my mind.
Q: I saw you give an interview after the election in which you alluded to the next task: you want to establish the Conservatives as the natural governing party of Canada. What does that entail?
A: What I want to do, of course, is really entrench, over time, a Conservative-majority coalition in the country. I probably—the more I’ve thought about it—I should probably stay away from the natural governing party terminology, because I think as soon as a party believes it’s the natural governing party it’s in a great deal of trouble. Since coming to office, we’ve grown steadily. We’ve grown from our base out. We haven’t tried to re-engineer the Conservative movement, we’ve built on it by bringing more people into it. We still have more work to do to be as representative of people as we’d like to be, but all the elements are there in terms of the coalition. I think, obviously, it has to be backed up with an agenda, and the agenda has to be successfully implemented, and the country has to buy into it and be happy with the results. So that’s the big thing we have to do, but I think in the end—given the outcomes of the election—we’re greatly helped not just by our own result but by the relative incoherence of the opposition as an alternative for government.
Q: This is a fundamentally different mission from when you started off in politics. The Reform Party, by virtue of its name, was about changing the political landscape, changing the political structure in Canada. When you’re trying to become the natural governing party you want to be where Canadians are, you have to be where Canadians are, so it’s more about managing a consensus than being a catalyst for change.
A: Well, first of all I think you have to remember, I began my serious political involvement in the Progressive Conservative Party way back, so my involvement has always been about conservatism. I began in the traditional Conservative Party and then became involved in the Reform Party, and—I think as you know probably better than anyone—my involvement in the Reform Party was really to re-invigorate conservative principles in Canadian politics. And I think with the eventual merger of the Reform Alliance and Progressive Conservatives, we’ve achieved an organization that embodies conservative principles but is also pragmatic and trying to reach a sufficient number of Canadians to form a government. But it’s also about, in the success of advancing conservative principles, of moving the country toward the values that you represent and that you demonstrate through the policies and the programs you deliver. And I think that both those things are happening. I also think the party and the government have been moving the country toward conservative principles. I think there’s an increasing number of people who vote for us not just because they think we’re the best choice but because they actually believe we [have] the values that are closest to their long-term values. And we’re starting to see in our own polling that at the federal level more people identify themselves as Conservatives and as voting Conservatives than any other party, and that is a huge change, and that never happened even during previous Conservative governments. So I’m optimistic that we’re moving in the right direction, but we have a lot of challenges.
Q: You’ve been running for something for nine years now, and you have had no real job security, you haven’t known from year to year where you’re going to be.
A: Yeah, in nine years I’ve run four national election campaigns, two leadership campaigns, a party referendum merger, and a couple of other convention processes. And of course by-elections. You know, I’ve been elected five times in my riding in nine years. I’ve been literally running non-stop.
Q: In addition to that, you’ve had all the false alarms about elections.
A: Yeah, every three months. Look, it’s been exhausting. I wouldn’t say as much for me as for my senior staff and for, frankly, senior public servants. Every three months we’ve had the plan for the government and every three months we’ve had the plan for the election. The great irony is that only once did I threaten an election, then I actually called it—that was in 2008—but every single three months in between we’ve had a threat of an election, and we’ve always taken it seriously. One of the reasons we won is in spite of the fact the other guys made the threats, we were always the best prepared. But yeah, it’s been two tracks, and it’s been exhausting to everyone involved in it. So it’s very different now planning for a four-year period.
Q: Over that nine years you develop habits of mind. I would imagine that you’re making short-term calculations all the time about how this is going to play, how that’s going to play. You try and look long-term but you have to be constantly aware that you may be going to the polls soon. Now that you’re in this longer-term mandate, how do you stop thinking that way?
A: Well, I’m not sure you completely do. There are some good disciplines this teaches you. Even when we were thinking short-term, you don’t ignore what could be the long-term or mid-term consequences of your actions. I would always point that out to staff: something may be great today, you know—we got a great headline today—and six months later everybody goes, “What were you thinking?” You’ve got a big problem, especially in a minority context. So it does heighten your political instincts, but I think that’s good. The party has to—and the government has to—move the country with it. Now, does that mean the country has to agree with you on every single issue? No, but even in a minority I never took the view that the opposition parties or even the country at large had to agree with every single thing we were doing, but they had to agree with the direction we were taking and that will remain the case. It’s just that we’re less under the gun from day to day.
Q: At the Conservative convention on June 10, you made quite a remarkable speech. The first thing I noticed was how much time you spent thanking people who worked in the parties, and thanking your MPs, your ministers, your staff, in great detail and with great specificity. And having watched you deliver speeches over more than 20 years now, I don’t think I ever recall an occasion where you went so far out of your way to express personal gratitude. Was that deliberate?
A: Well, I’m not sure it is that different. I think I’ve done similar things, maybe not at quite the same length, but on similar occasions. The party convention is unique in that you have, literally in one room, almost every single person who is responsible for whatever success the organization has had, and they also happen to be in the room at the moment where the organization has its greatest success, and so that’s obviously the appropriate thing to do. I’m the first to say, you look over the past nine, 10 years, we’re today a majority government not because we have the best leader but because we have the best team, and we have the best team on every level—and they actually work together as a team far more than any of the other guys.
Q: You don’t think that you operate differently at a human level than you would have 10 or 20 years ago?
A: Well, I think as you spend more time at any occupation you get better at everything you do—I hope—and so I think I’m better at a lot of things than I was 10 years ago. But do I think there’s a sudden change at the convention this year? No, no, no.
Q: Another striking thing, to me, was some of the language around foreign affairs, and you said that, essentially, Canada needs to redefine its national purpose, and that its national purpose is no longer just to go along with everyone else’s agendas. How would you describe Canada’s definition of its national interest in the past?
A: Well, I’m not going to belabour analyzing previous governments, I’ll just say this: since coming to office—in fact since becoming prime minister—the thing that’s probably struck me the most in terms of my previous expectations—I don’t even know what my expectations were—is not just how important foreign affairs/foreign relations is, but in fact that it’s become almost everything. There’s hardly anything today of any significance that doesn’t have a huge international dimension to it, beginning first and foremost with the economy. Yeah, we have a strong economy, but really we have a stronger Canadian economy within a world economy. When we had a world recession it didn’t matter that there wasn’t a single thing that had caused the recession anywhere else that was present in Canada, we were still in a recession, and we didn’t go down as far as the others, and now that it’s recovering, we’re recovering ahead of the others. But nevertheless, we’re just a piece of the global economy. That’s the first thing, and whether you go to security matters or pandemics, it’s all international. I’m not saying it is not necessary to have good relations with a lot of people; in fact, having good relations, first and foremost, with our most critical ally, the United States, is essential to Canada’s well-being, as are our good relations or good dimensions of relations with a large number of other players. But it isn’t enough, in this day and age, to say we get along with people. We have to have a clear sense of where we want to be and where we would like our partners to go in the various challenges that are in front of them. Whether they’re economic challenges or security challenges or anything else, we better know what we’re trying to get out of this and where we’re going to align ourselves, and it’s not just good enough to say, “everybody likes us.” That is not a sufficient way to protect your interests when your interests are so deeply enmeshed with everybody else’s.
Q: So what do we do differently?
A: First and foremost I think you see the differences in this government in terms of how we approach foreign relations. First of all, we take pretty clear stands. We take stands that we think reflect our own interests but our own interests in a way that reflects the interests of the wider community of nations, or particularly the wider interests of those nations with whom we share values and interests. Whether it’s taking strong and clear positions, for instance, at the G20 on something like a global financial regulation and a banking tax, we don’t just say, “Well, a consensus is developing for that. We’ll go along with it.” It was not in our interest. It actually happens to be bad policy as well. So we worked to oppose that particular agenda. I won’t get into specifics, but in some issues of foreign affairs or conflicts, what are the Canadian values or interests at stake? We think it’s pretty important that our long-run interests are tied somewhat to our trade, but that they’re more fundamentally tied to the kind of values we have in the world: freedom, democracy, human rights, the rule of law. We see over time—it’s not an ironclad rule—but those societies that promote those values tend to share our interests, and those that do not tend to, on occasion, if not frequently, become threats to us. We also make sure as well—and this is important—that we have the capacities. I know we’ve received some criticism for re-investing in our military, but when you’re in a dangerous world and countries are from time to time called upon to do things to deal with those dangers, if you don’t have the capacity to act you are not taken seriously. Nobody takes your views seriously unless you can contribute to solutions, and it’s very difficult to contribute to solutions unless you can contribute across the range of capabilities, up to and including military capabilities. I think if you look back—I think Hugh Segal’s written quite eloquently on this recently—Canada’s been at its most influential when it’s actually had a range of capabilities, so we’ve made sure we have capabilities.
Q: And when it’s actually been using them.
A: And when it’s been using them. If capabilities are just in the freezer all the time then they’re not really capabilities, right?
Q: You think Canadians are prepared?
A: We’re trying to make our foreign aid more effective. We don’t fund talk shops anymore, we fund aid that actually makes a difference. On the economy, if there’s a banking crisis and a debate over banking we make sure we’ve got a good record on that, but we also make sure we have good people who understand the subject matter who are able to be at the table and drive discussion. So that’s what we do across a range of issues. I say it’s a very different shift from simply every country likes us and would raise its glass to us at a cocktail party. That’s not the issue.
Q: It’s one thing to say you want a strong-in-principle foreign policy, and another thing to carry through. I admired a lot of things the government initially said on China and human rights violations, but when we had a negative response from China on the trade front, your government’s line shifted. We’ve also seen different policies with regard to Afghanistan, some based on principle, some buffeted by what our allies would want, or the public wants.
A: I think on China we’ve been clear from the beginning that we’re anxious to have good relations and to pursue vigorous economic relations, but we are going to continue to speak out on democracy and human rights issues, and we have. I think it took the Chinese government some time to get used to the fact we had shifted the approach from one of utter silence on those issues, but the shift was made and I think it’s a productive relationship. On Afghanistan, look, the issue is complex and obviously the government’s been trying to decide as it goes forward each step of the way what’s the next best thing to do. I’ve said from the beginning we’ve needed to be engaged there on all levels to try and affect outcomes, but that the goal cannot be the permanent military occupation and kind of de facto governance of the country. This is a position not only that we’re pursuing but that I’ve argued with our allies. I think if you look at what’s happened, the positions we’ve been arguing have, over the past two or three years, become the positions of our allies, after we’d already been clear which direction we were going.
Q: Do you think you can wield the same influence on Israel? You’ve been a strong supporter of Israel for some time, but you’re now more or less isolated in the G8.
A: The Middle East question is more difficult in terms of the opinion of others. I wouldn’t go so far as to say isolated, but it is a difficult position. That said, in my mind, the stakes are very clear, the issue is very clear and the stakes are very important. We all recognize there has to be a two-state solution, but we have in Israel essentially a Western democratic country that is an ally of ours, who’s the only state in the United Nations whose very existence is significantly questioned internationally and opposed by many, including by the other side of that particular conflict—still, to a large degree—and when I look around the world at those who most oppose the existence of Israel and seek its extinction, they are the very people who, in a security sense, are immediate—long-term but also immediate—threats to our own country. So I think that’s a very clear choice. That doesn’t mean there aren’t individual issues that become quite complicated and nuanced, but I think it is important and I will continue to be very clear with other leaders the way I think we should see this problem.
Q: You’re confident that Canadians are prepared to accept a more muscular foreign policy? I noticed that when you talked at the convention about Canada’s founding principles, you mentioned first the phrase “courageous warrior.”
A: I think you have to take the triumvirate: the courageous warrior, compassionate neighbour, confident partner.
Q: Yes, but you didn’t choose to say a nation of peacekeepers, nation of immigrants, or hewers of wood or drawers of water, you said a courageous warrior, and that is not a way that Canadians are really accustomed to thinking of themselves.
A: Well, not recently, but in fact Canada has a proud military history, beginning with the War of 1812 that essentially began to establish our sense of national identity. That was really the genesis of the geographically wide and culturally diverse nation we have today. We’ve been consistently involved on the right side of important conflicts that have shaped the world in which we live, that are largely responsible for moving the world in the overall positive direction in which it is moving. Look, let me give you the two big threats of the 20th century. First, fascism. Canada, next to its big-three allies, played one of the largest roles in the world in the defeat of fascism, which purged the world of one evil, and obviously the most robust military engagement anyone’s ever been involved in. And then through a different kind of engagement, the long, sustained state of alert of the Cold War against Communism, the other great threat to the world and to our civilization. In spite of, quite frankly, the ambivalence of some Liberal governments toward that, Canada, in fact, remained engaged in that from the beginning to the very end. I’m not dismissing peacekeeping, and I’m not dismissing foreign aid—they’re all important things that we need to do, and in some cases do better—but the real defining moments for the country and for the world are those big conflicts where everything’s at stake and where you take a side and show you can contribute to the right side.
Q: You suggest that we are in one great conflict, or that we’re heading to one that we need to be prepared for.
A: I think we always are.
Q: What is the nature of that present threat?
A: Well, I think it’s more difficult to define now. We know there are challenges to us. The most obvious is terrorism, Islamic extremist terrorism. We know that’s a big one globally. We also know, though, the world is becoming more complex, and the ability of our most important allies, and most importantly the United States, to single-handedly shape outcomes and protect our interests, has been diminishing, and so I’m saying we have to be prepared to contribute more, and that is what this government’s been doing.
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In conversation: Stephen Harper
By Kenneth Whyte - Tuesday, July 5, 2011 at 8:30 AM - 0 Comments
The PM on how he sees Canada’s role in the world and where he wants to take the country
Photographs by Blair Gable
Q: Let’s start with election night. Was it fun?
A: It’s always fun when you win.
Q: Did you take a moment to enjoy it?
A: Yeah. Look, as I think you know, we were pretty confident we were going to win, frankly, from the outset—the question was the margin—and we were feeling pretty good in the days leading up to it. I suppose, yeah, it was exciting that night. But you’re also coming off the end of a long, gruelling campaign, so there’s also a sense of relief and a sense of exhaustion all wrapped up together.
Q: If you’re not going to stop and enjoy that one, what are you going to stop for?
A: I did enjoy it. We have to enjoy things. These guys—my staff—probably enjoyed it more than I did. I’m always thinking. The next task is almost immediately on my mind.
Q: I saw you give an interview after the election in which you alluded to the next task: you want to establish the Conservatives as the natural governing party of Canada. What does that entail? Continue…
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In conversation: Gary Bettman
By Jonathon Gatehouse - Friday, June 17, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 5 Comments
What he thinks of future franchise relocation, the Aaron Rome hit and the culture of the game
Photograph by Christopher Wahl
A franchise move, a new discipline czar, a controversial hit, and a see-saw Stanley Cup final; it’s been a busy couple of weeks for the National Hockey League’s commissioner. Prior to Game 5, he sat down to reflect on a season of wins and losses.
Q: Not presuming any outcomes, but what would a Canadian team winning the Stanley Cup after such an extended period of time mean for the game of hockey?
A: I think it would be tremendously exciting for fans of the Canucks. But in the final analysis, who wins the Cup isn’t as important as how good the final was—how exciting, how dramatic, how entertaining, how skilful. If you’re a fan of the Canucks—or Bruins—you’ll be excited beyond belief if they win. If you cheer for somebody else, you’ll be more interested in how good the hockey is.
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The women shortage
By Brian Bethune - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 at 10:05 AM - 4 Comments
How sex selection of babies has led to a huge surplus of men and why that’s bad for all of us
Photography by Steve Simon
FLUENT IN CHINESE and Spanish, Mara Hvistendahl is a Beijing-based correspondent for Science magazine and a former journalism professor at Fudan University in Shanghai. She is the author of Unnatural Selection, about how and why rampant sex-selective abortion in Asia is skewing the entire world’s gender balance.
Q: The natural sex ratio at birth, resulting in equal numbers of men and women, is 105 males to 100 females. But in Asia, that ratio has been skewed for a generation, and demographers calculate there are now over 163 million women “missing” from the continent’s population. Which countries have been most affected?
A: The areas most affected are eastern China and northwest India—the most developed parts of those nations—as well as South Korea, Taiwan and northern Vietnam. The important thing is that it’s beginning to appear in other parts of India and China.
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In conversation: Peter Milliken
By John Geddes - Tuesday, June 7, 2011 at 9:30 AM - 2 Comments
How minority Parliaments lower the tone, why tossing out MPs fails, and his favourite Scotch
Photographs by Blair Gable
When the House of Commons resumes sitting this week, the first order of business for MPs will be electing a new Speaker. It will seem strange not to have Liberal Peter Milliken striving to keep order from the big chair. Milliken, 64, didn’t stand for re-election in his Kingston, Ont., riding this spring, ending his record decade-long run as Speaker. Maclean’s spoke to him in the elegant wood-panelled office he’s now leaving, sitting under a large framed print of Yousuf Karsh’s famous wartime portrait photo of Winston Churchill, which was taken on that very spot.
Q: When did you first become interested in the goings-on of the House of Commons?
A: The first visit I remember would have been in Grade 7 or 8. After I got into high school, my cousin John Matheson got elected from Leeds, right next door to Kingston. Once I got my driver’s licence, I started to come up to visit. He told me I could subscribe to Hansard and I started in 1962. I might have been 16. It was that period when I started following what went on in the House.
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On the death of Osama bin Laden—and the secret life of the elite Navy SEALs who killed him
By Michael Friscolanti - Friday, May 20, 2011 at 7:30 AM - 25 Comments
The author of ‘SEAL Team Six’ on the top-secret world of commandos
Photographs by Stephen Morton/Getty Images
A sniper by trade, Howard Wasdin was a special forces commando attached to the U.S. military’s most covert unit—the same squad that would later assassinate Osama bin Laden. His new book, SEAL Team Six, offers a rare glimpse into the top-secret world of America’s best-trained warriors.
Q: How did you find out that Osama bin Laden had finally been located and killed?
A: My neighbour actually came over. I had gotten up early that Monday, was getting ready to take the dogs out, and my neighbour knocks on the door. He said, “Happy Dead bin Laden Day.” I said, “What the hell are you talking about?” He said, “SEAL Team Six shot him in the head.” While I was relieved—as most of us were at first—I wasn’t completely at ease until I found out that nobody had been wounded or killed. In that type of operation, that is just amazing.
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In conversation: Peter Toohey
By Kate Fillion - Wednesday, May 18, 2011 at 9:55 AM - 0 Comments
On the uses of boredom, why it can foster creativity, and how it can change your life
Photographs by Richard Cannon/Getty Images
Peter Toohey is a professor of classics at the University of Calgary. In Boredom: A Lively History, he argues that boredom is an essential aspect of human experience.
Q: Do you agree with social theorists who say boredom is a symptom of modernity?
A: No. Boredom has a long history, there’s no question of that. There’s a late third-century inscription in the Italian city of Benevento thanking a public official who “rescued the population from endless boredom.” Even earlier, in Pompeii, there’s wall graffiti about boredom. I suspect people have experienced boredom from time immemorial.
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The beginning of the end of al-Qaeda?
By Nancy Macdonald - Wednesday, May 11, 2011 at 10:10 AM - 4 Comments
With bin Laden’s death, the war on terror has lost its purpose, according to al-Qaeda expert Peter Bergen
Courtesy Peter Bergen
Peter Bergen began covering the rise of al-Qaeda long before the twin towers fell. One of the few Western journalists to have interviewed Osama bin Laden, Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, and has written three books about the terrorist organization. In his latest, The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict Between America and al-Qaeda, he argues that 9/11 marked the climax of al-Qaeda’s power. Bin Laden’s organization, he writes, has been in decline ever since. Bergen spoke with Maclean’s from Washington.
Q: Al-Qaeda has now lost its best recruiter and fundraiser. Is this the beginning of the end?
A: Yes. When you joined the Nazi party, you didn’t swear an oath of allegiance to Naziism; you swore a personal oath of allegiance to Adolf Hitler. When you join al-Qaeda, you swear an oath of allegiance to bin Laden, not to al-Qaeda or al-Qaedism. Similarly, when groups join al-Qaeda in Iraq, they swear a personal fealty to bin Laden. He’s the grand fromage of al-Qaeda and the jihadi movement. No one can replace him.
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In conversation: Paul Allen
By Jason Kirby - Wednesday, May 4, 2011 at 11:05 AM - 0 Comments
On searching for aliens, buying pro sports teams, and his two brushes with death
Photographs by Chris Lane/Getty Images
Paul Allen co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates, but left after he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 1982 and the two men had a falling out. Since then, Allen has used his fortune, estimated at US$13 billion, to buy sports teams, a submarine, build rocket ships and fund brain research, among other pursuits. In his new book Idea Man, which he wrote after a second cancer scare, Allen delves into his partnership with Gates and how it sparked the personal computer revolution. But he also reveals that working with Gates could be like “being in hell.”
Q: It’s been two years since you were diagnosed with cancer for the second time in your life, this time non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. How is your health today?
A: It’s good. I still have a few small after-effects, but I get tested every few months to make sure I’m still in remission. But I’m doing wonderfully better than when I was really sick when I first started on the book.
