[Updated] More on the oil industry’s hand in a federal museum’s energy show

By John Geddes - Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 12:00 PM - 0 Comments

CBC has an interesting story (from its French service Radio-Canada) on the Imperial Oil Foundation’s involvement in the Canada Science and Technology Museum’s current exhibition “Energy: Power to Choose.”

Last month, here at Maclean’s we published an exclusive related piece, touching on the foundation’s sponsorship of the show, but focusing more on Access to Information documents detailing how the museum courted industry support, and how the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers influenced the museum’s portrayal of the oil sands. Over at Le Devoir, Helene Buzzetti has also done original reporting on this issue.

UPDATE: And, this morning, the Ottawa Citizen wades in with a follow that adds comments from the museum’s former vice-president, confirming what I called “pervasive influence from the energy sector in shaping the exhibition’s content.”

Topp on the arts

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, January 20, 2012 at 1:27 PM - 0 Comments

Brian Topp has released his fifth policy paper, this one on the arts.

I propose a cultural industries investment fund for the rest of Canada, and a matching offer of federal support for SODEC to help promote its own work. The federal government’s program of targeted tax credits and other supports in the cultural industries would be reviewed to ensure they complement this new approach…

I propose a careful, top-to-bottom rethink of the CBC’s television and internet service; the re-launch of Canadian public broadcasting on a model that will work in the 21st century — and then a substantial, sustained investment in that model…

I propose a review and modernization of the Broadcasting Act, and some clear dialogue with the CRTC (perhaps in the form of a Cabinet directive) to ensure the Act is enforced – including in its requirements that broadcasters (conventional, cable and internet) earn their access to the Canadian market through an appropriate commitment to Canadian content…

I propose our party commit to updating and modernizing federal status of the artist legislation and, in the course of doing so, review how basic federal income support and taxation policies (pensions, EI, the issue of income averaging) work for people pursuing artistic careers. 

And on that note there are new endorsement clips from Colin Mochrie, Peter Keleghan, Wendy Crewson, Art Hindle, Jani Lauzon, Tabby Johnson and Teresa Tova.

Last night, he picked up the endorsement of Chris Charlton.

And You Thought the CBC Had Problems

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, January 5, 2012 at 4:24 PM - 0 Comments

I sometimes talk about how Canada has problems making – or at least getting people to watch – home-grown TV, and what the CBC’s mission should be, and whether certain types of co-productions are really Canadian shows. But it’s easy to sound too pessimistic; the problems are real, but most Canadian networks have been able (sometimes almost by accident) to make shows that Canadians want to see. The CBC has some productions that have been successful; CTV has done some popular shows; the CW just arranged to pick up another Canadian show (albeit one set in the U.S., but that’s not the key to Canadian-ness, any more than an American movie isn’t American if it’s set in another country). The kid-com Mr. Young is doing well both here and on the Disney XD channel in the States. Even Global, which tends to have the least original scripted programming, unveiled the mini-series Bomb Girls this week. The issues with how Canadian networks make and schedule their programs are real enough, as are the issues with providing incentives for Canadian talent to stay in the country, but there has been some improvement.

And if you want to see a network that is really almost completely dependent on foreign scripted programming, you may have to look South. This New York Times article on PBS is about how the network is cool again – something it’s heavily emphasizing at its current Critics’ panel. But the coolness depends mostly on UK shows: the network got more popular because it got the rights to broadcast ITV’s Downton Abbey and BBC’s Sherlock. These are terrific shows. (Sherlock‘s “A Scandal In Belgravia” established it again as one of the best detective shows on TV, a master of that combination of craziness and earnestness that the Americans haven’t quite gotten right lately.) And PBS does a valuable thing by bringing them to North American viewers for free. But the network is still no closer to producing its own shows that could change U.S. dramatic TV, the way Sesame Street changed kids’ TV and its documentaries changed unscripted TV. It’s possible that producing home-grown shows is impossible or impractical for PBS, but without them, it will never be AMC, let alone HBO.

Moore: downsizing CBC remains a goal

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, January 3, 2012 at 11:03 AM - 0 Comments

Heritage Minister James Moore confirmed that downsizing and decentralizing the CBC is a goal for the federal Conservative government, Postmedia reports. In a year-end interview, Moore said, “the CBC is today — in terms of the way in which they have managed themselves internally — much more efficient and even smaller than they were when I became Heritage minister. They’re about 25 per cent smaller on the staffing side. Their footprint in Toronto and Montreal is smaller than it was before because — as we’ve said publicly — we want them to be in the regions more than they’ve ever been before.” Following the federal election, Moore shifted a longstanding commitment to maintaining funding to the national public broadcaster, and instead announced that he was looking for cuts of five to ten per cent, as in other federal departments.

Postmedia

CBC anniversary extravaganza cost $6.6 million

By macleans.ca - Thursday, December 29, 2011 at 12:18 PM - 0 Comments

The CBC’s 75th anniversary celebrations cost at least $6.6 million, according to documents obtained by the Globe and Mail. That figure includes both English- and French-language services. The public broadcaster said the figure exceeded existing budgets by $1.5 million, money spent for a series of events, including open doors at locations across the country and partnerships with federal museums. According to CBC spokesman Angus MacKinnon, “all 75th anniversary programming came out of our normal programming budgets, over the course of the year and in many different forms.” The anniversary budget documents were originally released to Montreal newspaper La Presse following a freedom of information request, and later obtained by The Globe and Mail. As permitted by the Access to Information Act, the CBC had blanked out specific programming-related costs within the documents.

‘The CBC continues to ignore our daily newspapers’

By Martin Patriquin - Tuesday, December 20, 2011 at 11:50 AM - 0 Comments

In its home province, at least, Quebecor is very much the incarnation of its name. The company’s myriad media properties are populated by old-time separatists and fleur-de-lys blue nationalists for whom the Canadian flag is a nuisance at best and an incursion at worst. Le Journal de Montréal, the scrappy populist tabloid founded in 1964, remains the organ grinder of choice for Quebec’s long-standing language debates, and it is clear on which side the paper falls. “Soon [the English] are going to call us frogs and pea soup in the street, just like when I was young!” opined Gilles Proulx recently. Quebecor’s news agency regularly publishes the words of former FLQ member Jacques Lanctôt, whose kidnapping of British diplomat James Cross touched off the October Crisis of 1970.

Beyond Quebec’s borders, though, Quebecor’s message is decidedly different. “Coast to coast and as Canadian as you are,” intones the promotional baritone over scenes of flowing rivers and snow-capped mountains, during a commercial for Sun News Network. Far from disparaging it, the network uses the Canadian flag extensively in its branding.

You might call it Canada’s two-faced media empire. Yet while Quebecor’s French and English divisions may be firmly ensconced in their respective linguistic and cultural solitudes, they share the overriding editorial bent of the company itself—and that of its president and CEO, Pierre Karl Péladeau. The reclusive and often contradictory Péladeau has a well-known disdain for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and has used his media holdings to attack the publicly funded Quebecor competitor—attacks that have taken on a new level of intensity over the last two years. Quebecor’s lawyers recently scored a victory against the CBC, when the Federal Court of Appeal ruled that the CBC must make public certain financial records.

The CBC, wrote Sun News host and columnist Ezra Levant recently in a typical broadside, is “a mega-corporation that demands a yearly $1.1-billion bailout from taxpayers, violates transparency laws and doesn’t register its secretive lobbying.” Yet Péladeau has been personally petitioning the CBC for a chunk of those taxpayer dollars while his media properties deride the CBC’s very existence. Over a period of 15 months, the Quebecor president, who oversees in excess of 16,000 employees, sent 12 personal letters and one handwritten fax to CBC president Hubert Lacroix requesting (and at times demanding) the CBC print its advertisements and promotions in Quebecor publications.

The letters, obtained through an Access to Information request and posted at the bottom of this article, reflect Péladeau’s combative nature—as well as his belief, however unsubstantiated, that the CBC has a long-running boycott of Quebecor. “[The CBC’s] total absence from [Quebecor daily] 24 Heures and but a small presence in Le Journal de Québec is flabbergasting, while both our competitors Metro and Le Soleil received the lion’s share,” Péladeau wrote in a letter dated Aug. 31, 2009. The Quebecor CEO further admonished Lacroix for what he called the CBC’s “frankly disproportionate coverage” of the labour strife at Le Journal de Montréal at the time. Two months later, Péladeau wrote that it “was unacceptable to democracy” that the CBC hadn’t advertised its municipal election coverage in Quebecor-owned media.

“Dear Hubert, I know that advertising choices interest you, so I include pages from Samedi Magazine,” Péladeau wrote in a handwritten note on Nov. 23, 2009. “Don’t worry, it’s not Quebecor Media that publishes it.” The note included two CBC advertisements that Péladeau had apparently clipped from Quebecor’s dishy (and since defunct) competitor; in his note, Péladeau makes light of Samedi’s low circulation numbers. Another of his missives decries the lack of CBC advertising dollars despite “a rather favourable article” written about a CBC personality in a Quebecor paper. Others still include graphs, pie charts and demographic data supporting Péladeau’s argument against what he calls CBC’s “totally unjustifiable boycott.”

“The CBC continues to ignore our daily newspapers, which are the biggest in Quebec,” Péladeau wrote in his final letter to Lacroix last December. “I can but protest once more this discriminatory attitude toward the group I have the privilege of overseeing, and it is equally detrimental to state television that it deprives itself of reaching an important part of the population.”

While he admits the CBC has never officially boycotted its media, Quebecor spokesperson Serge Sasseville says the facts speak for themselves: “There have simply been no CBC/Radio-Canada ads (except, ironically, in November 2010, when CBC/Radio-Canada went on a campaign to boast about its access to information record) in Quebecor Media since the beginning of 2009, a date which coincides with the beginning of the Journal de Montréal lockout,” Sasseville told Maclean’s via email. As well, “our sales staffs have been informed by media placement agencies working on behalf of CBC/Radio-Canada that they had received explicit orders from CBC/Radio-Canada not to advertise in our publications.” Not advertising in Quebecor publications, Sasseville adds, is akin to “depriving many of the very people that fund the state broadcaster of valuable information about CBC/Radio-Canada programming and coverage initiatives.”

For its part, the CBC says it has “over the years purchased advertising in [Péladeau’s] papers,” Lacroix told Maclean’s via email. “As we have said to Mr. Péladeau in our replies to his letters, we run our campaigns according to our objectives and choose the most appropriate media to ensure their success. That is our business and our expertise. In the same way, we do not suggest to Mr. Péladeau how to build his marketing, promotion or advertising campaigns or launch his programs . . . We would note that Radio-Canada does not receive advertising from Quebecor.”

Doubtless, Péladeau’s anti-CBC campaign is at least partly ideological. What unites the differing editorial stances of his English and French properties, apart from their visceral dislike of the public broadcaster, is a populist, free-market ideology of lower taxes and less regulation. Though it has its own public sector connection: roughly 45 per cent of Quebecor Media Inc., Quebecor’s media group, is owned by Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, the province’s pension manager funded in large part by taxpayer dollars.

Then there is the matter of Quebec City’s arena. Quebecor recently inked a deal that would give the company naming rights to the future home of Les Nordiques, should the city land an NHL franchise. The deal, finalized in September, will see some $400 million taxpayer dollars put toward a new stadium, which would then be rented to Quebecor. The deal, which wasn’t put to tender, required legislation to circumvent the government’s own laws against using public funds for a private company.

Like his English and French newspapers, Péladeau’s own political bent is conflicted. His father, Pierre, was in favour of Quebec’s separation from Canada; today, his son owns a cable news channel that peddles the very flag-draped brand of Canadian patriotism Pierre Sr. disdained. Yet Pierre Karl Péladeau remains strongly attached to the Québécois identity. In 2009, after losing a bidding war for ownership of the Montreal Canadiens, Péladeau implied that he didn’t like how the deal was strictly financial; it would have been better, he said, had the team owners better reflected Quebec’s identity. (The team was bought by the decidedly English Montreal Molson family.)

Perhaps there is method in all of Quebecor’s seeming contractions. “He’s a businessman above all else,” says Jean-Martin Aussant, a former Péquiste MNA who has since launched Option nationale, a splinter separatist party. “I think Pierre Karl found a niche and exploited it.” And, in the case of the CBC at least, he’s doing what any good businessman would do, contradictions be damned: trying to hobble the competition.

Why the CBC should be more like HBO

By Andrew Coyne - Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Photography by Andrew Tolson

There is an undeniably sinister quality to the apparently coordinated campaign of harassment currently under way against the CBC. Were it just occasional sniping from the Tory backbench, were it simply the Quebecor/Sun Media empire beating its favourite hobby horse, were the National Citizens Coalition merely on one of its crusades—were it even all three together—you might call it business as usual.

But when you consider the links between these different organizations—the Prime Minister’s former communications director Kory Teneycke is vice-president of Sun News Network, while the director of the NCC is the former Conservative candidate and online maven Stephen Taylor—the whole thing takes on a different cast. At what point do we conclude that this relentless public mauling at the hands of government MPs and their private sector proxies is intended not merely to expose the CBC to proper scrutiny as a public agency, but to intimidate it in its function as a news organization?

The problem the CBC faces is that whatever their motives might be, its antagonists are, on the whole, right (you should pardon the expression). They are right in terms of the immediate controversy, i.e., whether the corporation is obliged to comply with access to information requests, even from its competitors: clearly, under the law, it must. While the law makes exception for certain types of documents, it cannot be up to the CBC alone to decide which documents qualify for this exception, as a court has lately ruled.

Continue…

‘Least resistance’

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, December 2, 2011 at 8:30 AM - 0 Comments

Ontario Aboriginal Affairs Minister Kathleen Wynne criticizes the federal government’s response to the Attawapiskat crisis. And in an interview with APTN, Ms. Wynne says she can’t get Aboriginal Affairs Minister John Duncan to answer her calls.

Minister Duncan ran into NDP MP Charlie Angus yesterday at the CBC offices in Ottawa.

The minister insisted his department did not have “an awareness of what was in the community until a few days after Oct. 28.” But he went on to tell van Dusen that the feds had “people in the community” since April. ”I don’t understand,” she interrupted. “You said you didn’t know until Oct 28.” Duncan shot back with: “They did not identify there was an issue — and neither did Charlie Angus, the representative of the area, who is not shy about talking about Attawapiskat.”

If the latter was a dig at Angus’ abundant media availability, then Duncan was repaid in more than equal measure when he attempted to make a break from the interview. Hustled off by handlers —’We gave you the time. We have to go’ — Duncan made it down one stairwell before bumping into the man himself. Angus greeted him with a hearty, “Mr. Duncan! We’ve got an emergency in Attawapiskat. You’ll know now. Just so you don’t get caught flat-footed.”

Full video here.

You don’t have to hate the CBC to demand transparency

By Jesse Brown - Tuesday, November 29, 2011 at 6:06 PM - 0 Comments

Ash Mishra/CP Images

The Globe and Mail reports:

“Spurred on by recent controversy over the CBC’s compliance with Access to Information laws, Friends of Canadian Broadcasting is launching a satirical, wrestling-themed campaign in support of the CBC.”

The thing is, you don’t have to be an enemy of the CBC to want them to comply with the law and open up their books. Many of us who listen to the CBC and support the mission of public broadcasting would also like some transparency on how they spend the public’s money.

Unfortunately, the call for disclosure originates with the CBC’s rival, Quebecor. Quebecor is no friend of the CBC, and its demand to see their spending is a petty campaign to create scandal and to discredit. Quebecor’s obvious goal is to arm itself with proof that the CBC is irresponsibly wasting the money we give them- ammo for their argument that the CBC should therefore be deprived of funding completely.

Continue…

CBC to hand over internal records

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, November 23, 2011 at 2:46 PM - 0 Comments

The Federal Court of Appeal ruled on Wednesday that the CBC must hand over some of its internal records to the federal information commissioner, the Toronto Star reports. Information Commissioner Suzanne Legault, the court determined, has the right to see the documents in order to be able to review complaints filed against the public broadcaster following denials to freedom-of-information requests. The CBC blocked the release of records related to 16 such requests citing exemptions under the federal Access to Information and Privacy Act involving documents related to its journalistic, creative and programming activities. The public broadcaster is also under scrutiny in the Commons, where an ethics committee is investigating whether it abused the exemption clause to avoid handing over documents to the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. Quebecor-owned QMI Agency and Sun News Network, which ran a series of stories about the CBC’s spending habits, have also complained about unfairly being denied freedom-of-information requests.

The Toronto Star

Law class

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, November 14, 2011 at 11:30 AM - 0 Comments

The House of Commons law clerk considers Dean Del Mastro’s demand that the CBC turn over documents related to a matter already before the courts.

The sub judice convention is based on the principle that each branch of our parliamentary system of government should respect the functions of the other branches and not interfere or appear to do what belongs to one of the other branches to do. Our parliamentary system of government is based on a separation of the three basic governmental powers or functions: the executive, the legislative and the judicial. The judicial branch operates—and must be seen to operate—fully independent of both the executive and legislative branches. The credibility of the law courts as impartial arbiters of legal rights and as interpreters of the law depends on a clear recognition by the other branches of their independence.

Mr. Del Mastro previously, if temporarily, sought to have a sitting judge testify before a parliamentary committee.

The rest of the story

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, October 21, 2011 at 2:36 PM - 4 Comments

Yesterday afternoon, Conservative MP Brian Jean stood just before Question Period to share some news with the House.

Mr. Speaker, members will be shocked to know that the CBC has not corrected the record on its misleading report from Monday night. It failed to inform Canadians about the drug treatment court exemption in our government’s safe streets and communities act. Today the Quebec Bar Association confirmed that it supports the important drug treatment court exemption in Bill C-10 for those who are seeking treatment for their addictions.

It’s impossible to apply an asterisk to words as they are spoken and Hansard doesn’t include footnotes, but, in case you were wondering, here is the story of that third sentence. Continue…

How to talk out of both sides of your mouth (II)

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, October 19, 2011 at 9:36 AM - 3 Comments

Glen McGregor notes that, while Dean Del Mastro thinks “a lot of Canadians would be really troubled to know that we are spending an awful lot of taxpayers’ money on a court case where in fact they’re funding both sides of it” so far as it concerns the CBC, two federal departments are also fighting the information commissioner in court.

But both the Department of Justice and Public Safety Canada are currently locked in their own complex litigation against Legault over other documents … And just as CBC wants to exercise exemptions from releasing records because they pertain to journalistic, programming or creative activities, the government is claiming its own exemptions from the open-records law. It contends solicitor-client privilege trumps the requirement to release the documents.

In conversation: Kevin O’Leary

By Colin Campbell - Wednesday, October 5, 2011 at 10:50 AM - 2 Comments

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!

Support the arts, tax the rich

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, October 3, 2011 at 12:45 PM - 12 Comments

Brian Topp continues to make use of his Globe pulpit: defending the Canadian arts community and explaining the case for taxing the rich.

Like all other industrial economies, Canada foolishly mirrored American tax policy and has paid many of the same prices. The Conference Board of Canada recently reported that the gap between low and high-income earners is every bit as striking in Canada as in the United States. In our modest Canadian way, we too run structural deficits to pay for annual tax giveaways to those among us who need help the least.

Mr. Reagan’s tax policies belong in his museum. If these times call for belt-tightening – a highly debatable proposition, to say the least – then let’s start among those with the largest belts. A good place would be with a new top-tier income tax bracket, and a careful look at loopholes and giveaways that embarrass even American billionaires – some of whom are now leading the growing chorus for change.

‘Parliamentary business as warfare’

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, September 28, 2011 at 10:01 AM - 11 Comments

Ned Franks considers the early days of the 41st Parliament.

“I would have thought they would have changed, and stopped their approach to Parliamentary business as warfare by any other means,” Prof. Franks told The Hill Times. “They’re governing by fiat, and they’re forgetting that though they have a majority of seats, they got less than 40 per cent of the vote in May. I’m disappointed. I was expecting better.”

As discussed in the Hill Times piece, among those called by Conservatives to appear before a committee concerning the CBC is a sitting Federal Court judge.

Preventing inquiry

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 4:03 PM - 13 Comments

While the Conservatives launch inquiries into the CBC and NDP, another proposal disappears.

The MPs cite the sudden end during an in camera meeting of the Government Operations and Estimates Committee last week of a motion from Liberal MP John McCallum (Markham-Unionville, Ont.) that proposed an inquiry into nearly $50-million the government spent to spruce up cities and towns in Mr. Clement’s (Parry Sound-Muskoka, Ont.) upscale cottage-country constituency for the 2010 summit of G8 leaders.

The motion disappeared after going into the secret meeting, and Mr. McCallum, along with all MPs on the committee, cannot disclose what was said or what happened to the motion while the committee doors were closed.

The brilliant John A. biopic

By Andrew Coyne - Monday, September 26, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 19 Comments

Steve Wilkie/CBC

Chances are you missed it, but something quite significant happened on the CBC Monday night. Indeed, I may say it was an event of some importance in the life of the nation: the historical drama John A: Birth of a Country. It is rare enough to see any Canadian history on Canadian television, and rarer still something of this quality. There have been subtler dramas, there have been more exact histories, but this is the finest historical drama to appear on the CBC since The National Dream almost 40 years ago.

Explaining the road to Confederation through the personal and political battle between Sir John A. Macdonald and George Brown, it should dispel forever a pernicious myth: that Canada’s founding, like much of its history, was a dry bit of horse-trading, devoid of interest or excitement. On the contrary, as any viewer of John A will be convinced, it was the creation of men of extraordinary passion and conviction, driven by personal ambition but guided by their own greatness toward an end much larger than themselves. The last half-hour, in particular, is simply riveting: the scene where Macdonald seeks to persuade Brown to join his cabinet—on his terms—is a study in psychological and political acuity.

That the show brings Macdonald so vividly to life (Shawn Doyle is marvellous in the part, wobbly accent notwithstanding) is an achievement, though not entirely surprising: he remains one of the richest, most colourful subjects in all of political history, a brawling, drunken, cheerfully unscrupulous rebuke to the whole “Peace, Order and Good Government” theory of Canada’s development, which has bored two generations of Canadian schoolchildren.

But we know Macdonald was great. Of much more significance is the treatment of Brown, at last restored to his true position in the historical firmament, second only to Macdonald among the Fathers of Confederation, and perhaps not even second. It is to Brown that we owe much of the design of the country: not only his famous insistence on “rep by pop,” or representation by population (apparently still a controversial idea), but the very principle of federalism, against the unitary state that was Macdonald’s dream. And it was his momentous decision to cross the floor, joining Macdonald in the grand coalition that would pursue federation with the other scattered colonies of British North America, that made the whole enterprise possible. All that we are, everything this country has become, can be traced to that supreme act of statesmanship.

Yet in popular terms at least, he remains very much the forgotten man of Canadian history. There are no highways or airports named for him, as there are for Macdonald and his Quebec lieutenant, George-Étienne Cartier. The last major biography him was J. M. Careless’s—52 years ago. He simply does not fit into the dominant, Macdonald-centred view of Canadian history as an orderly series of public works projects. He was a Victorian liberal: reform-minded, pro free trade, skeptical of government, with unfortunate (though by no means unusual for his time) views of Catholics and the French. As such he was an inconvenience, and so was made largely to disappear. With any luck, John A, and Peter Outerbridge’s doughty performance as George Brown, will begin to change that.

Good as it is, I do not see John A as an argument for public broadcasting (the question is not whether I like a particular show, but whether I can justify forcing others to pay for my pleasures; the subscription model, à la HBO, has more to recommend it, both on artistic and philosophical grounds). But if we are going to have public broadcasting, surely this is exactly the sort of thing it should be doing. Which makes it a mystery why the CBC should seem so intent on burying it. It’s bad enough that it has taken the corporation decades to produce a show on this, the single most important event in our history, but it has thus far committed only to this first instalment in what I gather was planned to be a four-part series on Macdonald’s life (drawing on Richard J. Gwyn’s shrewd biography, John A: The Man Who Made Us). For goodness sake, we’re only up to 1864: the adventure has barely begun.

What’s truly unforgiveable, however, is the lack of promotion. At a time when the network is blanketing the airwaves with ads for Battle of the Blades and other bilge, you’d think it could spare some of its PR budget for a project as important as this. Yet people working at the CBC were unaware it existed until a week ago. If the corporation were in any doubt of what it had on its hands (it shouldn’t: the producer, Bernard Zukerman, has a proven track record, as does director Jerry Ciccoritti and writer Bruce Smith) it cannot be now.

It is just too much like the CBC to turn what ought to have been a moment of triumph into a fiasco. Fortunately, there is a remedy. We’ve seen the pilot. Now green-light the rest of the series. Give it a decent time slot. And maybe tell the odd person it’s on.

A Giller for the masses

By Brian Bethune - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

David Cooper/Toronto Star/Getstock

It turned out to be a grand Labour Day weekend for literary Saskatchewan. Two women from the province won the Scotiabank Giller Prize’s new promotional plums: one got the Readers’ Choice Award, given to the book that received the most votes in an online poll conducted by the CBC; the other was the randomly chosen winner of two tickets to the November Giller gala in Toronto (plus airfare, hotel stay, clothing and meal allowances). Myrna Dey, 69, from tiny Kamsack, 330 km east of Saskatoon, took the Readers’ Choice for her debut novel Extensions, while Helen McCaslin of Regina, also 69, won the tickets.

The Giller itself did all right—in a situation that could have come out far worse. The idea of adding a populist element, the Readers’ Choice, to a literary award that’s never been shy about promoting itself—but is sensitive to constant outraged cries that it “missed” a popular book (like Emma Donoghue’s Room last year)—must have seemed a natural. But it was always going to fit uneasily with another core aspect of the Giller: the prize derives its prestige from its elite status.

The Giller’s three-person jury, which winnows down the submissions by stages to the ultimate winner of the $50,000 prize, is always made up of book insiders, mostly writers and announced with fanfare every spring. As Giller director Elana Rabinovitch puts it, “We select juries for their expertise very carefully and have full faith they will see where the rubies are.” Despite the fact all literary prize lists are explained, by insider gossip, in terms of book trade politics, to raise the possibility that popularity might influence judges disturbs a lot of literati. “Now we’ll see—and to my mind it cheapens the prize—people barking like trained seals to get mentioned,” says novelist Andrew Somerset.

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Poverty, terrorism and 9/11

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, September 9, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 38 Comments

During his interview with the CBC, Stephen Harper was asked about comments Jean Chretien made nine years ago on the first anniversary of Sept. 11.

Nobody who was killed on 9/11 deserved it remotely. It was a terrible thing, has nothing to do with wealth versus poverty. It has to do with, in this case, a particular hateful ideology that has attacked people around the world, not just affluent societies like our own, but some pretty poor places. You know, I think the people killed in Indonesia, in India. The fact that Afghanistan became a failed state, where you know, people just essentially lived in not just poverty, but brutality, to the point where a kind of Islamic fascist regime literally invited terrorists, international terrorists to set up camp in their country. I think that that kind of situation obviously bred a threat, and that’s why we are so worried when we look around the world now at other places where the same thing could happen. You know, I think you know some of them: Somalia, Yemen, that are there or at that kind of stage. That’s the kind of thing I think we really have to worry about, where you have not just poverty, but poverty and literally lawlessness becomes the nature of the state. And I do think it’s in our broader interests and the right thing to do to try and help people and help countries so that they don’t get into that situation. That’s why, you know, we obviously are helping with the famine in East Africa. It’s why we’re so involved in Haiti. Not to have that kind of a state in our own backyard. So those, I think those kinds of situations are very dangerous.

Mr. Chretien’s comments, as reported by the Globe, were as follows. Continue…

And that’s the kind of life it’s been

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Monday, August 29, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 2 Comments

CTV; The Toronto Star; Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute

It was two decades ago that the media first started asking Lloyd Robertson when he was finally going to retire. We’re talking 1991, the year of Bush the elder’s Iraq war, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Brian Mulroney was prime minister and the GST came into effect. Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas and that Coke can were a hot topic. A time so distant that a Kevin Costner movie won the Best Picture Oscar. Nirvana, then the world’s hottest band, is now played on “oldie” stations.

Robertson, CTV’s éminence orange, was just 57, but had already been anchoring the network’s national news for 15 years, and before that had been a CBC fixture for another 22. “I always thought I’d be out of there by now, that someone would come along and tap me on the shoulder and say, ‘Hey, you’re getting long in the tooth—get out,’ ” he told the Montreal Gazette. Absent the push, the trick, said the anchor, was to “pick a time that’s obvious to you and your audience.” He mused about the big 6-0. It’s possible that some people even believed him.

Should all go according to plan, Robertson will actually step down this Sept. 1. Now 77, and with a combined 41 years behind the anchor’s desk at CBC and CTV, he is the longest-serving national anchor in North American TV history. Not exactly a retirement, since Robertson plans to continue on in his other job co-hosting the current affairs show W5, and will appear for some special event coverage. But it brings an end to his nightly television presence, and an era in Canadian broadcasting.

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The “state broadcaster” and the state

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, August 3, 2011 at 11:25 AM - 75 Comments

Public Safety Minister Vic Toews laments that the “state broadcaster” is not being sufficiently deferential to the state.

“I have long since given up trying to understand the state broadcaster, or the CBC as we know them more popularly,” Toews said. “I find it so fascinating that they refuse to put the names of the individuals and pictures of the individuals on their network given that these are individuals who have been found by a tribunal not to be admissible in Canada and legal warrants have been issued for their arrest…

“I find it ironic that the CBC was always so quick to try to implicate our Canadian armed forces in war crimes in Afghanistan and never hesitant to mention that, but in this situation, when we actually have rulings from tribunals, they’re reluctant to involve themselves…

“They have no right to be in Canada,” Toews said. “And for the state broadcaster not to acknowledge that and work with law enforcement agencies is very disappointing.”

Not much of a spectator sport

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, June 27, 2011 at 3:11 PM - 0 Comments

Kathleen Petty signs off as host of CBC Radio’s The House with a few final thoughts.

Hugh Segal, with whom I spoke at the beginning of the show, once wrote an editorial in support of a set of rules we implemented on this program: no more personal attacks, people talking over each other, politicians being allowed to freely throw around talking points unchallenged. That set of guiding principles meant MP panels were few and far between. We reached out more often to individual federal politicians, but we interviewed fewer of them. In part, because fewer of them were willing to agree to in-depth, one-on-one interviews. We wanted more policy discussions instead of political discussions…

I didn’t think we were really asking for much. If, in response to a question, a politician hesitated, even a little, I was reasonably confident that the answer required some thought, instead of tired talking points that require none. That in Ottawa is a victory. And that is, in my view, a problem. We talk AT each other, not WITH each other. We keep score, assign penalties, and generally treat politics as a sport. But as sports go, politics might be a great a game for participants, but not spectators or listeners. I sense a great disconnect. Why don’t Canadians vote? Perhaps, because we’re not treating them as participants – but as spectators.

Mellissa Fung and her captors

By Anne Kingston - Friday, May 13, 2011 at 7:00 AM - 3 Comments

Photograph by Jessica Darmanin

“Do you want to see where I was stabbed?” Mellissa Fung asks, pulling aside the strap of her sleeveless pink blouse and pointing to the back of her right shoulder. The CBC reporter is proud of the bruise-like wound: it marks the resistance she put up during her abduction outside of Kabul in 2008.

A similar spirit of refusal animates Under an Afghan Sky, Fung’s memoir of her kidnapping and 28-day captivity in an underground hole the size of a closet. The publicity tour has brought her to a Toronto hotel, where she’s politely, if reluctantly, discussing it. “I’m an old-school journalist,” the 38-year-old says. “I’d rather tell the story than be the story.”

She was a hesitant memoirist, too. “I wanted to move on.” Dredging it up again was “pretty horrible,” she says, but she needed to address “misinformation”—that money or Taliban members were exchanged for her release. A screenplay was rumoured to be in the works. “I wanted my own record, the way I remembered it,” says Fung, a self-described “control freak.”

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