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.

Continue…

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.

Continue…

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.”

Continue…

CBC: want to email our articles? Pay us!

By Jesse Brown - Friday, May 6, 2011 at 2:49 PM - 27 Comments

If you’d like to send some friends an article from the CBC’s website, then the CBC would like $20. If you want to print six copies of an article, the CBC wants $10. And if you’re interested in posting an excerpt of an article to your blog, then the CBC is interested in charging $500 to your credit card for each year your post is online.

Of course, you don’t need to pay the CBC anything. You could just copy and paste a CBC article into an email and pay nothing. You could hit Ctrl-P and print as many copies as you like. You could drag and drop a chunk of text from a CBC webpage to your blog post without reaching for your Visa. And you could do any of these commonly done things without even knowing that the CBC wants to charge you to do them. Unless you share CBC content in a very specific and somewhat obscure way—by clicking the little icons at the end of each article or a button labeled “Republish,” you can freely share their stuff the way people share everything else on the Internet—copy and paste.

But if you do, it might interest you to know that the CBC is encouraging the friends you share their content with to rat you out in the hopes of scoring a $1,000,000 reward. Continue…

Does the CBC want Quebec to separate?

By Martin Patriquin - Tuesday, April 19, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 29 Comments

Ezra Levant is wrong. The CBC Vote Compass thing isn’t a shill for the Liberal Party of Canada*. For fans of National Unity™, it’s actually much worse. The CBC, or at least the CBC Vote Compass, is apparently in bed with the coalition-loving, Canada-hating, tax-and-spend separatists. Gadzooks!

A nefarious CBC mole of my acquaintance pointed this out to me while we rode the Métro together yesterday. Basically, he pointed out that if you say you’re from Quebec and answer the Vote Compass questions in a mildly lefty fashion (strong yes to getting out of Afghanistan, soft yes to government policies to stimulate economy, etc), you have a good chance of being designated a Bloc Québécois voter—even if you answer “strongly disagree” to “Quebec should become an independent state.”

I did it with my riding, just for fun. Here’s the crucial question:

I finished the questionnaire, the Vote Compass thought long and hard, and spat out the following:

Weird. Based on the national unity question alone, you’d think the national unity question would disqualify the Bloc entirely. It’s the reason the party exists, after all, despite whatever late-game spin Duceppe is spouting these days.

*A quick note: my God, Sun News been slogging that tired narrative for all it’s worth. I guess it sucks for them/it that most Canadians are part of that giant, mushy, feel-good sort-of-left-of-centre usurped long ago by the Liberal Party of Canada. They even used to win election after election thanks to it.

Mansbridge v. Layton

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, April 19, 2011 at 10:57 AM - 27 Comments

The NDP leader talks to the CBC host.

Layton said “there’s no question” Harper’s goal in 2004 talks with his party and the Bloc Quebecois was to become prime minister. Harper has also denied that he was trying to topple the Martin government and seize power in 2004.

Layton told Mansbridge that Harper is “fabricating things here.” Layton said the Conservative leader, who was then the Leader of the Official Opposition, was the driving force for the “arrangement” with other opposition parties at the time. ”We were called together by Stephen Harper to send a letter to the governor general to make it clear that if Paul Martin was defeated by the speech from the throne, she should turn to the other parties to govern,” Layton told the CBC’s Peter Mansbridge on board his campaign bus near Charlottetown. ”There was no question about it that the ultimate goal here was for Stephen Harper to become prime minister.”

Mr. Harper has his choice of invites

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, March 31, 2011 at 2:02 PM - 31 Comments

Rogers and the University of Toronto, the CBC and Canada 2020 have each now offered to host a debate between Stephen Harper and Michael Ignatieff.

It's my 'Dragon's Den' party, I'll cry if I want to

By Rebecca Eckler - Tuesday, March 22, 2011 at 8:19 AM - 6 Comments

Photograph by Cole Garside

On a recent cold and snowy Wednesday evening, 70 of Laura Berg’s closest friends and family gathered at a pub in Toronto to watch her appearance on the hit CBC show Dragons’ Den. Berg, founder of a company that teaches parents how to communicate with their babies using sign language, had gone on the reality show seeking financial backing for her business from the five “dragons”—Canadian multi-millionaires—way back in May. But for months, she had had to keep the results secret. Entrepreneurs who appear on the show “have to sign a contract: if they tell, we come and kill them,” joked a CBC media relations employee.

Like Berg, more and more contestants are opting for the big reveal: they host parties to celebrate their 15 minutes (or less) of fame, where their family and friends watch the show en masse to discover whether they landed a deal with the dragons. Or not, which—as the two million loyal viewers of the show know—is more commonly the case.

Hosting your own Dragons’ Den viewing party requires a degree of courage. First, contestants have no idea how long they will be on air. Though the pitches average 40 minutes, they are edited for TV to between 30 seconds and seven minutes. Pitchers also have no idea what the “dragons” said about them when they left the room (hint: it’s not always flattering). Even entrepreneurs who secured a deal have no idea how they will come off on television, which is not known as a forgiving medium.

Consequently, there’s an unmistakable frisson of tension at most viewing parties, and Berg’s was no exception. Her friends were nervous she might have bombed. “God, I really hope we’re going to get to party after this,” said one. When the show started at 8 p.m., the room fell silent. Berg huddled close to her husband near the giant TV, clutching a glass of wine, while everyone watched her pitch. After about six minutes, huge applause: the “dragons” had decided to invest in her company! Hooting and hugs all around.

As well as some surprise. “I’m shocked at how well she spoke,” one guest confided. “She’s very shy and quiet, so to see her speaking so eloquently on TV was amazing.”

Also surprising, to everyone including Berg: Brett Wilson, one of the show’s wealthy “dragons” (who has since left the show), turned up at her bash. Guests were floored, but Wilson said he’d been to “at least four or five” viewing parties. “I learn about them from local media. If I’m in the same city, I try to show up.”

Okay, but was he ever at a party hosted by an entrepreneur who did not get a deal? (One has to wonder if contestants would gather their nearest and dearest to watch them fail on national television.) “Yes,” Wilson said. “Even if you don’t get a deal, you get amazing exposure on the show. So people have parties and that brings them even more exposure.”

Photographs by Cole Garside

Barb Stegemann of Halifax hosted a viewing party for her friends in early February. The founder of the fragrance company 7 Virtues says, “I started my business in my garage with a Visa card.” For her, the party was more of a shout-out for friends and family than an exercise in self-celebration. “They have put up with me,” she explains. “They all believed in me from the start. I’m so honoured to have these kinds of friends, so this party was to thank them.”

Stegemann had had a hard time keeping her fate on the show a secret. “I was busting at the seams,” she groans. “I love telling people everything and for me to not be able to tell something that could be the biggest life-altering experience in my life—it was killing me!” Fortunately, her friends, unlike Berg’s, didn’t attempt to pry the truth out of her. “They told me not to tell them what had happened because they couldn’t be trusted,” she laughs.

For her, the most nerve-wracking aspect of her viewing party was watching herself on television. She knew she’d cried during filming. And she knew she was going to cry again when she watched the episode with her friends. Tears of joy, this time: Brett Wilson had cut her a deal.

In conversation: Brett Wilson

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

Photographs By Chris Bolin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CBC Ombudsman blasts O’Leary for racist remark

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, March 8, 2011 at 2:18 PM - 26 Comments

Kevin O’Leary, co-host of The Lang & O’Leary Exchange and head of O’Leary Funds, has been chastised by the CBC’s ombudsman for being “unambiguously offensive” in using a racist term during a broadcast last year. During a televised exchange with his co-host Amanda Lang on October 4, 2010, O’Leary called her “an Indian giver with a forked tongue” in a discussion of BHP Billiton’s bid to take over PotashCorp. Lang immediately rebuked O’Leary by saying “that [term] came from the 19th century and I do not approve.” Neither did Alex Jamieson, an aboriginal man who filed a complaint to the CBC in December 2010. While the CBC will likely make an on-air apology for the incident, O’Leary is not required to express regret because he is a contract commentator.

The National Post

Stephen Harper and Canada, a love story (III)

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, February 8, 2011 at 10:13 AM - 46 Comments

From Paul and John’s consideration of the Harper Era, insight into the place of patriotism in the new Conservative party.

“We didn’t have a competing narrative,” one of them says now. “What are the symbols people talk about when they talk about Canada? Health care. The Charter. Peacekeeping. The United Nations. The CBC. Almost every single example was a Liberal achievement or a Liberal policy. We had gotten to a point in Canada where the conservative side of politics had been marginalized—where we weren’t even recognized as legitimately Canadian.”

… Harper had to carve out a patriotic vocabulary that was different from the Liberals’. “We didn’t have any illusions about displacing the Liberal vision and the Liberal narrative of Canada,” the strategist says. “But we needed to give the conservative side something to rally around.” So almost from the beginning, Harper started building a distinct right-of-centre, patriotic new vocabulary. “It’s the Arctic,” this strategist said. “It’s the military. It’s the RCMP. It’s the embrace of hockey and lacrosse and curling.” In policy terms, it included the child care cheques and the accompanying rhetoric of families able to make their own choices.

See previously here and here.

Cindor Reeves on CBC (updated)

By Michael Petrou - Monday, February 7, 2011 at 9:45 AM - 7 Comments

The CBC has picked up the Cindor Reeves story. I originally reported he would be on CBC Radio’s The Current today. That has been moved to tomorrow. I understand Alan White, previously of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, will be on the show as well. I have several blog posts on Reeves. This article provides most of the background.

Cindor Reeves and the CBC

By Michael Petrou - Sunday, February 6, 2011 at 6:00 AM - 6 Comments

Cindor Reeves will be on CBC Radio’s The Current Monday morning.

This week: Newsmakers

By Charlie Gillis, Chris Sorensen and Nicholas Köhler - Friday, February 4, 2011 at 12:00 PM - 0 Comments

A breath of fresh Canadian air
The usual right vs. left political jabber of American talk TV was punctuated this week by a few clear-eyed statements courtesy of Canada’s first female prime minister. On Real Time With Bill Maher, former Progressive Conservative leader Kim Campbell called Republican Jack Kingston‘s views on global warming “absolute rubbish,” pointing out to the Georgia congressman that scientists didn’t set out looking for a non-existent problem just to torture right-leaning politicians. When the conversation shifted toward the evolution vs. creation debate, Campbell asked if Kingston was concerned about the alarming rise of antibiotic-resistant microorganisms in hospitals. He squirmed. “That’s evolution,” she said to applause. Does 132 days as PM preclude Campbell from a future in politics?

Lolita’s lepidopterist
In addition to writing great novels, Vladimir Nabokov was a self-taught expert on the evolutionary biology of butterflies—though, like any amateur, the Lolita author faced skepticism from the scientific establishment. Now one of his most audacious theories has been proven right. A paper published by the Royal Society has endorsed Nabokov’s hypothesis that butterflies are not indigenous to North America, but rather arrived in a series of “waves” from Asia. The new research was made possible by gene-sequencing technology Nabokov never had. Said Naomi Pierce, a Harvard expert who co-authored the study: “It’s really quite a marvel.”

Single White Premier seeks less idiotic press
With three female premiers and a female prime minister, Julia Gillard, Australian voters seem fairly accustomed to the idea of women in politics. The media? Not so much. The country’s biggest national newspaper, the Australian, ran a front-page story about Tasmanian premier Lara Giddings‘s first day in office that zeroed in on her comments (in response to a reporter’s question) about the challenges of snaring a husband when you’re a busy politician. The headline read: “Leftist Lara still looking for Mr. Right.” Critics shook their heads. “Why on Earth was this suddenly relevant the day Giddings became Tasmania’s first female premier?” asked one Sydney Morning Herald columnist, noting Giddings was previously an unmarried treasurer and an unmarried attorney general. “It was not as if she had landed from Mars.”

Continue…

Nurse Jack

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, February 4, 2011 at 9:24 AM - 16 Comments

The NDP leader spends two days working in a hospital.