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The Globe and Mail

The Lunch

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INTRODUCTION

Behind the corporate sagas and market swings that dominate Report on Business’s coverage loom some of the country’s most colourful

personalities and their dreams of empire.

In daily journalism, these characters sometimes remain hidden as we follow the money instead of the people. So we sent our reporters on a mission: Go eat with important business personalities. Write about the meal. Tell us what makes this individual tick. Make us laugh.

Since we launched The Lunch as a weekly feature in October of 2010, our reporters have dined with an impressive collection of executives, central bank governors, regulators, fund mangers, oligarchs, activists, cabinet ministers, judges, entrepreneurs and a former Prime Minister.

Eric Reguly took us to Oleg Deripaska’s dacha, and sipped white Burgundy with RBC CEO Gord Nixon in London. Jacquie McNish dined on duck crepes with Felix Chee and watched Bill Ackman eat the spinach she had ordered. Michael McCain, under pressure from shareholders to show results at Maple Leaf Foods Inc., shared cold cut sandwiches with Derek DeCloet. Carson Block, whose Muddy Waters LLC had just published its report attacking Sino-Forest Corp.‘s business practices, tucked into a Cobb Salad with Andy Hoffman.

We gained insight into Jim Flaherty’s tough decisions in December, 2008, as the global economic crisis forced the Tories to pour stimulus dollars into the economy. We explained Felix Chee’s reasons for wanting to open an office of the China Investment Corp. in Canada and Bill Doyle’s resilient response to Ottawa’s thwarting of the takeover bid for Potash Corp. - “My skin is thicker than the bark on that tree.” Mining tycoon Ian Telfer recounted his years-long quest to build the company

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that eventually became Goldcorp. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales’s favourite book is The Fountainhead; Maureen Sabia, one of only a handful of women to penetrate Canada’s top boardrooms as a director, favours Atlas Shrugged.

It was just lunch - or, if we’re being honest, sometimes more of a snack. But breaking bread with these players over the last year and a half has allowed us to take readers deeper into the psyche of the country’s business leadership. We hope you’ll enjoy the snapshot, and we will continue lunching with the mighty.

Elena CherneyEditor, Report on Business

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Contents

INTRODUCTIONby Elena CherneyEditor, Report on Business

PAUL MARTINby Tara PerkinsSept. 17, 2011

GEORGE GOSBEEby Gordon PittsDec. 3, 2011

JILL ABRAMSONby Susan KrashinskyDec. 10, 2011

DAMBISA MOYOby Simon HouptApril 23, 2011

CARSON BLOCKby Andy HoffmanJuly 16, 2011

IAN TELFERby Andy HoffmanMay 28, 2011

STANLEY MAby Richard BlackwellOct. 8, 2011

DAVID DODGEby Jacquie McNishSept. 28, 2011

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FELIX CHEEby Jacquie McNishMarch 26, 2011

EILEEN MERCIERby Jacquie McNishMay 14, 2011

BILL DOYLEby Jacquie McNishOct. 29, 2011

JACYNTHE CÔTÉby Jacquie McNishJan. 8, 2011

JIMMY WALESby Joanna SlaterJan. 15, 2011

OLEG DERIPASKAby Eric RegulyFeb. 12, 2011

TYE BURTby Eric RegulyFeb. 26, 2011

AZIM PREMJIby Tavia GrantMarch 12, 2011

MAUREEN SABIAby Marina StraussAug. 20, 2011

ROBERT DELUCEby Brent JangOct. 22, 2011

MELANIE AITKENby Steve LadurantayeFeb. 19, 2011

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ED SONSHINEby Steve LadurantayeJan. 21, 2011

MICHAEL MCCAINby Derek DecloetSept. 3, 2011

JANET HOLDERby Nathan VanderklippeNov. 19, 2011

WALTER ROBBby Marina StraussNov. 5, 2011

GORD NIXONby Eric RegulyNov. 27, 2010

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PAUL MARTIN

Martin’s recipe for economic stability: The former prime minister says the only way out of the global financial mess

is to work together - and fast

TARA PERKINSSaturday, Sept. 17, 2011.

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Montreal — FINANCIAL SERVICES REPORTER

Double-dip, L-shaped, V-shaped recession. These are terms Paul Martin doesn’t have time for.

“Call it what you want, we didn’t come out of it,” he says.

We’re sitting in a private room in Le Muscadin, an Italian restaurant a few blocks from the Old Montreal headquarters of Canada Steamship Lines Inc. - a company in which his family has had an ownership stake for 30 years. Canada’s 21st prime minister has been given office space by his sons on a floor that houses their private equity fund.

When he’s not on his farm about an hour outside Montreal, it is from that office that Mr. Martin, the man who fixed Canada’s fiscal mess in the 1990s as Jean Chrétien’s finance minister and gave rise to the Group of 20, is waging his many post-political battles. He chairs the Congo Basin Forest Fund, which aims to end poverty in the 10-nation region. He advises the Coalition for Dialogue on Africa, which examines critical issues facing the continent. He guides the Martin Aboriginal Educational Initiative, a not-for-profit organization he established to help native youth.

And these days, as governments and central bankers around the world grapple with punishing debt loads, painful public spending cuts and the shocks of the 2008 financial meltdown, his focus is on ensuring such a collapse doesn’t happen again. Frustratingly, he says, people aren’t grasping just how desperate the situation is.

“They think this is an American or British or European problem. It is today, but tomorrow it’s going to be a Chinese problem or it’s going to be an Indian problem. And there’s no reason to think that Chinese banks, Indian banks, when they’re as big as Citigroup, aren’t going to have the same problems.”

So here’s how Mr. Martin, who still advises the International Monetary Fund, would fix the world: First, create one international body that oversees financial regulations. Ensuring that all countries’ banking and insurance sectors abide by harmonized global rules - at least to minimum levels - is key to preventing another crisis, he argues. At the moment, authorities in various pockets of the globe are implementing a patchwork of new rules, with relatively little co-ordination.

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Now is the time for global financial authorities to get their act together, and turn regulation into a finely tuned machine, he says. “I think there is [currently] a continuation of the Great Contraction into a period of very, very slow growth,” he says, using the only phrase he feels accurately describes the economic situation. “And we’re not going to increase [spending] substantially as long as governments are deleveraging and consumers are deleveraging, and that’s happening in Canada, it’s happening in the United States, and it’s happening in Europe.”

“They can each have the best banking regulation, shadow regulation, everything you want, but banking is a global industry, so unless there are minimum standards, it isn’t going to work.”

Second: Europe must move toward greater economic integration, adopting a form of economic federalism (somewhat akin to the Canadian model) that will allow the continent to issue euro bonds. “If you’re not prepared to have that political and economic integration, then you’re not going to have the euro bond and, under those circumstances, I don’t see how there’s a solution to their problems.”

Third: End the discord. For the most part, politicians have been making bad situations worse, he says. “If they had allowed Greece to default in the beginning, it would have been a one-week story and that’s that. They built it up, like the debt thing in the United States. It’s a problem that actually the government built up into a big issue.”

These are weighty issues that require a great deal of travel, late hours and hard work. His schedule is such that his 15-coffee-a-day habit is understandable. But over the course of his meal of filleted orange roughy, one gets the sense he’s enjoying himself more than ever as he prods today’s politicians to make changes.

He says he has remained involved with the International Monetary Fund mostly so he can cajole the G20 nations into becoming more forward-looking than reactionary. “There are going to be bank crises going ahead. There are going to be [economic and political] tectonic plates crashing as Asia rises and Europe and North America hopefully stabilize. You have to have an organization that can deal with all of the great shifts that are occurring through this period.”

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Such hard truths need to be on the table to provide the momentum for speedy change, Mr. Martin says. And, from a new pact in Europe to new bridges in Montreal, he believes that this moment of upheaval is the time for fresh starts.

That also applies to issues such as the welfare of Canada’s aboriginal population, who Mr. Martin says could gain a fresh start by fostering more business skills in youths, something that Mr. Martin’s Aboriginal Education Initiative is working toward.

In Canada, he would like to see the federal government take advantage of this country’s relatively strong finances to quickly make needed investments in infrastructure, education, and research and development. Those, he says, will be the key to Canada’s prosperity in a world where success will hinge on the ability to compete with, and tap into, Asia.

“Our economy is slowing down, we’re going to be affected by the [downturn in the] United States and we’re going to be affected by Europe,” he says. “We have to penetrate those rising Asian markets, and we’re not going to do that unless we have got the best-educated work force, unless we’ve got the best infrastructure, and unless we are creating our own Apples.”

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* * * * * * * * * *

C U R R I C U L U M V I TA E

BACKGROUND

• Born Aug. 28, 1938, in Windsor, Ont.• His father, Paul Martin Sr., was a Liberal MP who served in the

cabinets of William Lyon Mackenzie King, Louis Saint Laurent, Lester B. Pearson, and Pierre Trudeau.

EDUCATION

• Earned a B.A. at the University of Toronto’s St. Michael’s College Studied law at U of T

CAREER

• Made a name for himself in business at Canada Steamship Lines, where he was installed as CEO in the early 1970s.

• Bought CSL with an associate.• Minister of Finance from 1993 to 2002• Prime Minister from the end of 2003 to early 2006

POST-GOVERNMENT

• “When I went into government, I divorced myself totally from the shipping business and, after I’d been away for 20 years, it made no sense for me to get involved again,” he says.

PERSONAL

• Married to Sheila Ann Cowan• Has three sons: Paul, Jamie and David

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* * * * * * * * * *

I N H I S O W N W O R D S

On his regular lunch routine

“I am largely a sandwich-at-my-desk guy.”

On his schedule

“I take the month of August more or less off, but I’m pretty much travelling most of the time. So I work wherever I happen to be.”

On the effects of all that travel

“The truth of the matter is, as you get older, it’s not the 18 hours to Africa, it’s the six- or eight-hour time difference that constantly gets you.”

On the current Finance Minister

“I like Jim Flaherty and I think he’s done a pretty good job. I also think that he’s done a good job internationally with the G20.”

On Mr. Flaherty’s idea to reform personal income taxes

“I do think it would be a good thing … [but] I don’t think they can afford to do it. … They shouldn’t have cut the GST.”

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GEORGE GOSBEE

His patriotism runs more than skin-deep; Sporting a maple leaf tattoo, Calgary investment banker George Gosbee says

Canada’s road to prosperity runs through Alberta

GORDON PITTS3 December 2011

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Between the rabbit meatballs and the lamb-melt sandwiches, the talk of pipelines and stock exchanges, George Gosbee drops a juicy morsel on the table.

He has a tattoo. A maple leaf. Somewhere on his body.

“At 18, I was a proud Canadian,” he explains with a mischievous smile.

Now 42, after two decades of investment banking in Calgary, having sold one firm and started another, he can afford to laugh at his youthful indiscretion.

Mr. Gosbee’s home turf is nine blocks of downtown Calgary, but he has roamed far beyond that – as a director, until recently, of a restructuring Chrysler; as an economic panelist advising Finance Minister Jim Flaherty; and now as the man carrying the investment banking dreams of Alberta Treasury Branches, a province-owned conventional bank with an ambition to be much more.

The teenage exuberance has scarcely diminished, although the nationalism has evolved beyond a skin-deep maple leaf to a deeply held belief that Canada’s prosperity and the future of Alberta and its energy economy are tightly intertwined.

That means his total commitment to the Keystone XL pipeline, which he is confident will be built after the 2012 U.S. presidential election has slid off the agenda. It also means advocacy of a made-in-Canada stock exchange model, embodied by the Maple Group’s bid for TMX Group Inc. that is now the focus of regulatory hearings.

Mr. Gosbee’s patriotism is buttressed by the conviction that Calgary is emerging as an energy finance and head office capital – while tempered with regret that, in the process, city and province may be losing their vaunted entrepreneurial spirit.

“This is a real big worry of mine, that the [Western Canada Sedimentary] Basin is changing, and it is becoming a big-company game,” says Mr. Gosbee, chief executive officer of AltaCorp Capital Inc., an investment bank he owns in concert with ATB Financial, the storefront brand of Alberta Treasury Branches.

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We are lunching at a big-company kind of place – Divino, a smart bistro on Calgary’s Stephen Avenue. His offices are a stone’s throw away and he is well known to the wait staff. Much of the food is locally grown, and we share the appetizer of rabbit meatballs, and he endorses the lamb melt as a main course.

Mr. Gosbee has just returned from Toronto, Canada’s major capital markets centre, where he opened a branch of AltaCorp. “I’m proud that our headquarters is in Calgary and the satellite office is in Toronto,” he teases, playing on the love-hate relationship that permeates Calgary’s psyche.

More seriously, he resents Toronto’s stereotyping of Calgary as a fenced-off enclosure of parochial cowboys. He tells of an Ontario marketing specialist who pitched a branding strategy for the business school at University of Calgary, where Mr. Gosbee sits on the advisory council. The big idea? The school would be an academy for “entrepreneurial mavericks.”

“I sat back and bit my tongue,” he says, still angry. “If I hear those words one more time … ,” he says, his voice trailing away in the lunchtime chatter.

In fact, Calgary is the most global city in the country, he argues, reflected in the horizons of its companies. “Those companies aren’t hiring entrepreneurial mavericks – they are hiring people who want to build careers with them.”

The graduates want to stay in Calgary “because of the excitement of the city – the global nature, the transaction environment.” Mr. Gosbee likes to talk about “deal velocity,” which he says captures the addictive pace of the city.

Yet he feels nostalgia for a disappearing Calgary, where you would start, build, merge and sell several companies in a lifetime – where you could raise cash from friends and associates, and start a business with $5-million. Now it costs $5-million for one oil well, he muses.

Only the majors have enough capital to play that game, to amass deep inventories of land, with clear access to new drilling technology and oil-field service companies that tend to overlook the smaller operators now. Faced with barriers of cost and capital, fewer owners of small enterprises feel they can set out and build something bigger again.

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Yet the West’s challenges are relatively benign, even after the Obama administration put the Keystone XL pipeline on the shelf, he says. “Politics is getting in the way of good public policy,” he says, contending the pipeline will ultimately be built. Meanwhile, the decision bodes well for alternative projects, such as the Northern Gateway pipeline to the Pacific, because it heightens awareness of the dangers of being overly dependent on the United States.

Even so, Mr. Gosbee paints a trying short-term picture for Alberta, as it copes with low natural gas prices and a more tepid outlook for conventional production. That will squeeze royalties, raising the likelihood the province will have to cut costs drastically or – God forbid – impose a sales tax. Given the appetite for public services, he predicts the latter, thus deviating from Alberta orthodoxy.

Mr. Gosbee was born in Kingston, where his father studied at Queen’s University before bundling up the young family to drive west for medical school. Young George grew up as a finance junkie, and on university graduation, joined investment bank Peters & Co., a hothouse of finance talent that had spawned local legends Murray Edwards and Ron Mathison. In time, he founded his own firm, Tristone, which he sold in 2009 – reluctantly, he says, at the urging of other shareholders.

During a hiatus from investment banking, he took big roles on the board of Alberta Investment Management Corp., the province’s $72-billion wealth manager, and as a Chrysler Group LLC director working with one of the smartest people he has ever met – Fiat and Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne.

He started talking with David Mowat, CEO of ATB, about the potential for an Alberta full-service financial institution that offers corporate finance, commercial and retail banking. The focus of Mr. Gosbee’s new AltaCorp would be on energy and agriculture, plus the related technologies to feed Alberta’s prosperity over the next two to three decades.

Mr. Gosbee’s friends say he tends to be a scatter-gun thinker, his attention hopping from one idea to another. Mr. Mowat, in fact, likes that trait in a partner. “Sometimes George doesn’t know what he can’t do,” Mr. Mowat says. Like a good hunting dog, he believes “he can tree any size of animal.”

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So Mr. Gosbee was appalled when he first heard that TMX Group Inc., which owns the Toronto Stock Exchange, was partnering up with the London Stock Exchange. He had spent time in London’s financial district, setting up a Tristone office, and concluded London has “one of the most archaic financial jurisdictions in the world in regard to rules and regulations and the treatment of capital markets.” And then there was the issue of where the British economy was going. “I said: ‘That’s our partner?’” he recalls.

He joined the resistance to the London merger because, in his view, any partner to the Canadian stock exchanges would have to recognize what Canada, and Calgary, had to offer as a global finance centre. That wasn’t the London way. “Our little country is very proficient at raising capital outside our boundaries, and yet, we were about to hand over the keys.” So it was natural he would support financial institution-led Maple Group Acquisition Corp., which sent the London exchange packing, but still faces concerns from regulators, including the federal Competition Bureau.

Even if Maple fails, there will still be that maple leaf tattoo which, Mr. Gosbee later disclosed in a phone conversation, is on his lower leg. The location sums up its owner quite well – making a statement, but not too outrageous.

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* * * * * * * * * *

C U R R I C U L U M V I TA E

BACKGROUND

• Born Aug. 30, 1969 in Kingston.• His father John is a Calgary doctor• He and his wife Karen have three children

EDUCATION

• Bachelor of Commerce, University of Calgary, 1991

PERSONAL

• Runs, hikes and skis• Adviser to University of Calgary’s Haskayne School of Business

and school of public policy• A director of National Ballet School Foundation• Former chairman of Alberta College of Art and Design

CAREER HIGHLIGHTS

• Six years with Peters & Co.• Three years at Newcrest Capital• Founded Tristone Capital in 2000; sold it to Macquarie Bank in

2009• Founded AltaCorp in 2010, with Alberta Treasury Branches as

minority partner

FUNDRAISING HIGH

• One of five executives left on an Alberta mountaintop to raise money for an air-rescue non-profit

• Armed with smartphones, they had to stay till they raised $100,000 each

• Raised a total of $1.3-million in five hours

— The Globe and Mail Inc.

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JILL ABRAMSON

Alpha female of The New York Times; The executive editor is in charge of shepherding the venerable paper’s daily news

operation and its digital strategy

SUSAN KRASHINSKY10 December 2011

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Jill Abramson is too busy to worry about her own appetite. She’s more concerned about other people’s appetites – specifically, her readers’ hunger for news.

It’s a concern that takes up all of her time now, just a couple of months into her new job as executive editor of The New York Times. It leaves her with no time to take off to a restaurant midday, or even spend much time considering the caterer’s menu. If she must stop for lunch, it’s in an icy-white boardroom in the Times building, not far from the newsroom, perched behind a lacquered white table with a view of Manhattan and the Hudson river twinkling in the sun. And she orders the salmon as if on autopilot.

Besides the monumental task of overseeing the Times’ daily news operations, there are two major distractions consuming Ms. Abramson’s spare time. The first is nurturing the paper’s digital strategy, including the paywall on its website and mobile applications, in a bid to ask readers to pay for the news, not just the paper. It’s a project that will define The New York Times for years to come – an attempt to create a sustainable business model to keep its journalism alive.

The second is the cavalcade of reporters coming to set down for posterity her thoughts on journalism, on her life, even her tattoo (a New York subway token). As the first woman to be named executive editor of the Times, Ms. Abramson is not only making the news; she is the news.

“My background is as an investigative reporter, and in Washington, [D.C.], I always kind of liked that no one knew what I looked like,” she says. “… It’s a little much.”

But that is not to say Ms. Abramson does not grasp the impact of her promotion. Being the first woman at the helm of the Times is “very meaningful to me,” she says. In her office down in the newsroom, a blown-up black-and-white photo hangs above her desk. It’s a picture of the newsroom in 1895, a sea of men and one woman: Mary Taft, one of the first female reporters hired by the paper. Like most women at the time and many for decades after, Ms. Taft was relegated to writing for the “women’s pages.” She also covered the suffragette movement – until it became front page news, and male reporters took over.

By contrast, when Ms. Abramson landed her first job out of college, at Time Magazine’s Boston bureau, her boss was a woman: Sandra Burton, the first woman to become a bureau chief at the magazine.

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(Years later, when Ms. Abramson became the first female Washington bureau chief for the

Times, she received a telegram from Ms. Burton at the overseas post she then held, saying that she could hear the glass shattering all the way from Hong Kong.)

In her own career, Ms. Abramson was more preoccupied with the struggle to nail down investigative pieces than with being taken seriously as a female reporter. “Most of my worries were not about fighting to get ahead.”

In her new job, Ms. Abramson is in charge of driving another wave of change – the one now taking place at the venerable newspaper.

“We’re in transition, and we’re the pioneers,” she says, remembering the days when the newspaper’s website was managed by a team in an entirely separate building. No more. The Times has been attempting to strike the very fine balance between finding new ways to make the money it needs to support its journalism, and not dropping off the social radar. Many newspapers that have tried to erect paywalls were hit not only with declining online advertising revenue but also with fewer readers and the threat of losing their place in the cultural conversation.

The Times has responded by erecting a paywall that is positively full of holes. It allows readers access to 20 articles a month for free, as well as Times blogs and anything they find through a link on social media such as Facebook or Twitter. When it launched the new paywall, the Times was criticized for a paper tiger approach. But Ms. Abramson contends it has safeguarded the newspaper’s place in people’s daily media habits – and has also managed to get the most-engaged readers to support the product financially. More than 300,000 of them have obliged – through new digital subscriptions or combined print-and-online subscriptions – which has helped to improve the performance of that weekend brunch tradition, the fat printed Sunday Times.

At the same time, the paper is fighting to produce high-quality free content, to keep Web traffic and advertising up. Its India-focused blog, India Ink, is free, as are a number of new mobile applications, or apps, which are new so it’s difficult to charge for them. Once readers see their value, Ms. Abramson suggests they may also be brought behind the paywall.

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“There is still a yearning for information that is diligently gathered, intelligently analyzed, and for stories that are elegantly edited and told. I see that appetite growing.”

She says all this as she methodically strikes at her own appetite with an endive and radicchio salad, and some steamed salmon served with barley, a catered lunch she has eaten with visitors before.

This image of Ms. Abramson as a hard-charging, brusque and demanding leader is only part of the picture. “All of these profiles make me sound like such a serious person, and I think of myself as a humorous person,” she says during our hour-long conversation, during which she rarely cracks a smile.

Still, there is evidence of a lighter side. She is one-half of a lasting marriage and a demonstratively proud mother of two. And, after years as a hard-boiled political reporter and editor-on-the-ascent, with two serious books under her belt, she published a book entirely devoted to her golden retriever.

The Puppy Diaries came out of an online column she wrote about the first year of her dog’s life, and was a weekend project, “pure fun and pure joy.” The awkward timing of its release, just as she was appointed to arguably the most serious post in American journalism, has been remarked upon and occasionally mocked. (“Are you writing about her dog?” famed publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. asks impishly when we meet in the hallway and he is told whom I’m interviewing.)

If Ms. Abramson worries about her humorous side getting lost, her self-portrait of a smitten dog owner, stuffed with literary allusion, should put that concern to rest: The original column revealed that Scout is named for the character in To Kill a Mockingbird; she feels the need to distinguish that Henry is “my husband, not O.”; and one instalment was entitled “Chewing Toward Bethlehem.” At home, with the dog, Ms. Abramson wrote that Henry is the “pack leader” in the vocabulary of Cesar Millan, the self-proclaimed Dog Whisperer and pet training guru.

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But here at the Times, she is very much the Alpha – and while she has benefited from the struggles of the women who came before her, she knows it’s still rare enough to have a woman be the leader. In the corridors of power her paper peers into, women are taking more executive roles but it’s still “not that many,” she notes. At the Times’ Page 1 meetings, there are still more male faces around the table.

But when she graduated from Harvard and started her career, New York Times Co. was embroiled in a class-action lawsuit by employees alleging widespread gender discrimination. Now its CEO is a woman, and Ms. Abramson runs the newsroom where Mary Taft was an outlier. And conversations about her gender are nothing more than a temporary distraction from the job she’s here to do – not just producing tomorrow’s paper, but helping to mould a future for the news that’s fit to print.

“I gotta go in, like, two seconds,” she says, scooping a few berries into her mouth for dessert. Even a lunch on home turf is taking longer than she’d like. “I’m going to visit my Metro desk.”

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* * * * * * * * * *

C U R R I C U L U M V I TA E

PERSONAL

• Born March 19, 1954• A native New Yorker, she grew up on Manhattan’s Upper West

Side• Bachelor of Arts in history and literature from Harvard;

graduated magna cum laude in 1976

FAMILY

• Married to Henry Griggs, a media relations consultant to non-profit organizations

• Daughter Cornelia is in her first year as a surgeon at Columbia• Presbyterian Hospital• Son Will runs a record label, Cantora Records, with two partners

CAREER

• Was a reporter for the magazine American Lawyer and then editor of Legal Times

• At The Wall Street Journal, she worked as an investigative reporter and became Washington deputy bureau chief

• Winner of the National Press Club award for national correspondent in 1992

• Joined the Times in 1997; became Washington bureau chief in 2000 and managing editor of the paper in 2003

• Author of three books: Where They Are Now; Strange Justice (with Jane Mayer) and The Puppy Diaries

HER IDOLS

• Jane Mayer (co-author of her second book) and Times columnist Maureen Dowd – who both have the ability to dig up information, zero in on its importance, and communicate it to readers with style, wit and clarity, “something akin to having perfect pitch.”

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* * * * * * * * * *

I N H E R O W N W O R D S

On Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who declared in a recent speech, “I’m a goddamn journalist”:

“He was a source for us. We were well aware of what his ambitions were for Wikileaks itself, and I guess a role in journalism that he saw it playing. … He was not working on our journalism. He was a source of documents.”

On aggregation sites like the Huffington Post:

“That can dilute the impact of New York Times journalism. We pour so many resources into doing the kind of digging and reporting that we do, that we want to make sure that there is a big awareness that it’s the Times’ story and we still are making that investment. The flipside is … aggregation sites can create more awareness of high-impact stories and bring people linking to read the story. So we benefit from that.”

On an issue so well-worn, her predecessor Bill Keller capitalizes the phrase in his columns – The Future of Journalism:

“I think there’s a giant future for reliable information. It’s wrong to obsess over ‘will there always be newspapers?’ … The raw ingredients for the newspaper are the same for the journal as on all of our other platforms. And those even deepen more, are the power of our storytelling and the power of our journalism. I’m confident of that at the Times. And I feel that, given the economic realities of this era, that people do crave information and that being better informed is an active part of citizenship here that isn’t going away.”

— The Globe and Mail Inc.

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DAMBISA MOYO

The private life of a public intellectual; The celebrity economist is keen to talk about her books, but not so eager

to discuss the money she made at Goldman Sachs

SIMON HOUPT23 April 2011

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It is a privilege asserted by celebrities. On occasion, before you sit down with a movie star who is in the midst of a troubling personal situation – say, an action hero in marital meltdown from too much action on the side; or a starlet recently sprung from the clink after a spot of shoplifting – a personal publicist will pull you aside and try to insist you not ask “personal questions.”

But what is to be made of an international economist who begins a conversation with the same suppressing stipulation? The other day, the author Dambisa Moyo was still settling into a banquette at the French bistro Le Select in downtown Toronto to discuss her new book, How the West Was Lost when she said, “I don’t know whether they told you – I suppose it depends where the conversation goes – but I don’t do personal.”

What does that mean? “My whole personal life. I just don’t think it’s relevant or interesting.”

Is Ms. Moyo being coy? Willfully naive? For her status – indeed, one might say her celebrity, or her brand – is indubitably due in part to her unusual biography.

Two years ago, she became the It Girl of the popular economics press for her first book, Dead Aid, which argues that development aid to Africa had bred corruption and dependence on the West.

While a number of Western thinkers had made the same case, here was a native daughter of Zambia finally giving them cover from accusations of racism and stinginess. Forbes ran an excerpt. The New York Times called her “the anti-Bono.” Time magazine put her on its list of the world’s 100 most influential people of 2009. The book became a bestseller and was translated into Chinese, German, Greek, Italian, and other languages.

Born in Lusaka, Ms. Moyo, 42, spent her early years in the United States, where her father earned his PhD. The family returned to Zambia when she was 8 years old. Her mother took a job in banking, eventually becoming the chairwoman of the state-owned Indo-Zambia Bank; her father heads a local anti-corruption organization.

At age 19, Ms. Moyo followed her parents’ expatriate inclinations, leaving Zambia to work at the World Bank. She received a masters of public administration from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government,

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an MBA in finance at the American University in Washington, D.C., and a doctorate in economics from Oxford University.

After working about eight years for Goldman Sachs in capital markets, primarily conducting bond issues for emerging economies such as Turkey, South Africa and Israel, Ms. Moyo left the bank upon the publication of Dead Aid to pursue life as a public intellectual.

If it seems a glamorous existence, it can also be gruelling. Before her 24-hour stop in Toronto, she’d been on the road for six weeks. Still to come in the next seven days was Ottawa, Boston, New York, Houston, Bogota, Cartagena and Atlanta.

She wouldn’t be home in London for another week after that. A cold she’d picked up along the way was sapping her energy and appetite, leaving her poking dutifully but without enthusiasm at a goat cheese omelette.

Dead Aid very much alive

While her new book is causing a stir, the bulk of the crowds flocking to hear Ms. Moyo – including about 150 at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management on the evening before this lunch at Le Select – want to talk about Dead Aid.

And though she’s adept at conspicuously dropping the titles of both her books into conversation, she still seems more animated by the issues in Dead Aid than in discussing how the United States could recover from decades of fiscal mismanagement, the subject of How the West Was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly – and the Stark Choices Ahead

She says that may be because “there’s much more discourse around the things in the second book.”

Nevertheless, she says she doesn’t think people in the United States “really understand how bad it is.” (She was speaking before this week’s credit downgrade warning from Standard & Poor’s vaulted the U.S. national debt back into the news.)

How the West Was Lost offers a greatest-hits package of the policies that have helped put some of the world’s largest economies in a historic bind: cheap money, a preference for consumption over investment, a

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gutting of the public education system, and the Ponzi-like schemes of unfunded public pension liabilities. (She writes of “Western economies,” but her focus really is the United States.)

The book argues that, unless the West takes drastic measures, it will be surpassed by the emerging economics of China, India, Russia and Brazil.

Ms. Moyo says the two books are joined by the theme of unintended consequences: Just as billions sent to Africa helped create a culture of corruption, misaligned incentives for home ownership created a devastating housing bubble in the U.S.

While she believes it is the place of government to create a strong regulatory environment that allows appropriate incentives to flourish, she disagrees with government itself creating those incentives.

“I do not believe in any forms of policies where I fear that government gets involved and alters, manipulates – in any manner – encourages us to make different decisions than we otherwise might have,” she says.

While that may seem sensible enough, How the West Was Lost has received some withering reviews, including a critique by the Economist that noted numerous factual errors and one by the Financial Times’ international economy editor that suggested Ms. Moyo deployed “distortions and inventions” to justify her extreme theories.

Hard to pin down

But though she says she writes her books to draw people into a debate and persuade them “based on logic and evidence,” it can be frustrating to try to divine her exact position.

The cover of her new book features a U.S. $100 bill with a picture of Mao Zedong in place of Benjamin Franklin, but when asked about the rise of China, she says, “I just think there’s almost an overobsession with what’s going on with China.”

And while she decries the sound-bite-oriented culture that makes it difficult for a national government to have a mature, honest conversation with its citizens about economic priorities, she concludes How the West Was Lost with four scenarios that seem designed to attract

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shocked attention, including what she argues is a strong possibility for the U.S. to default on its debt.

But when pressed on the relative likelihood of each scenario playing out, she offers a mild defence of their inclusion in the book.

“Policymaking is not absolute science,” she says. “Who’s to say? If I say, doggedly, ‘Oh, the U.S. is never going to recover’ – they could tomorrow change their policy stand and become much more aggressive on education and energy policy, and the outcome would be completely different.”

Awkward moment

Still, there is only a single moment when lunch turns notably awkward. While discussing her work at Goldman, I ask, off-hand, “Good money?”

“What does that mean?” she replies, her vowels tightening up. “Is there a threshold?” I explain that investment banking has a reputation of attracting people interested in making money. “I didn’t go there for the money,” she says.

And then, an upbraiding: “I lived in the U.S. for 15 years, and 11 years in Europe, and I’ve always thought it was bordering on bad manners to ask people about their incomes or how much they earned.”

Talk turns to other matters: her extensive travel through Asia, how often she gets back to Zambia to visit with her family, and her position as a non-executive director of multinational companies. Last year she was appointed to the board of Barclays Bank, becoming the only woman in that position. She is also a board member of SAB Miller.

“It’s a global company. A big chunk of the bottom line comes from the emerging markets, that’s my background,” she explains.

“My remuneration is public,” she adds wearily. “In case you want to know.”

* * * * * * * * * *

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“Most policy makers in the United States today would argue that the fundamental problem in the labour market is a cyclical one … I don’t think they really have come to terms with the fact that it’s a structural problem. And if you come from Africa, Asia, or South America, or even Europe, you know what structural unemployment feels like. You know what 20 per cent unemployment is, projected for decades.”

Dambisa Moyo

Economist and author of How the West Was Lost and Dead Aid

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* * * * * * * * * *

C U R R I C U L U M V I TA E

BEGINNINGS

• Born 1969, Lusaka, Zambia.• Three siblings• Mother: Orlean Moyo, chairwoman, Indo-Zambia Bank• Father: Stephen Moyo, executive secretary, Integrity Foundation

CAREER

• World Bank: Europe and Central Asia, Africa departments (1993-95)

• Goldman Sachs: capital markets (2001-2009)

EDUCATION

• Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government; a masters of public administration

• American University in Washington, D.C.; an MBA in finance• Oxford University; a doctorate in economics

BOARD MEMBER

• Barrick Gold Corp.• SABMiller PLC• Barclays PLC• Barclays Bank PLC• Lundin Petroleum AB

WANT MORE MOYO?

• Twitter: @dambisamoyo• Facebook.com/DMoyo• 75 videos at YouTube.com/dambisamoyo

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T H E R E V I E W S

“How the West Was Lost is more interesting, wider in scale and more important than Dead Aid … Moyo shows well how fundamental economic liberalization espoused by what she calls the profligate, greedy, self-interested West has come back to bite it.”

–The Guardian

“She has the background and smarts to opine smartly. … Sadly, however, judging by her new book, she is bored by logic, incapable of writing an interesting sentence, and lazy. … This book, in its incoherence, reads less like a book than like a first-year MBA’s study notes for the next day’s case class on international economics.”

–The Globe and Mail

“Her new book … offers up a well-reasoned look at how the world’s most-advanced nations are squandering their economic lead – and how they might survive by fighting Chinese fire with fire.”

–Bloomberg

“Here are two predictions about the world economy. First, the West’s malaise and the rise of emerging economies will yield a mountain of books. Second, few of these are likely to be as bad as How the West Was Lost.”

–The Economist

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CARSON BLOCK

The man who cut a giant down in size; With a single report, the ‘shock jock’ analyst axed three-quarters of the value off

Sino-Forest and roiled markets with his no-holds-barred accusations about doing business in China

ANDY HOFFMAN16 July 2011

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Carson Block, the enfant terrible short-seller who obliterated $3-billion in market value from what was once the largest Canadian-listed forestry company, scoffs at his enemies and detractors.

The founder of Muddy Waters LLC, which published a June 2 research report alleging Sino-Forest Corp. is a “fraud” and a “multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme,” leans back and smirks when asked about those who deride his work.

Sino-Forest chief executive officer Allen Chan has called Mr. Block a self-interested “shock jock” whose research is “inaccurate and unfounded.” Dundee Securities analyst Richard Kelertas, before abandoning coverage of the company pending the publication of an independent investigation, labelled the Muddy Waters report “a pile of crap.”

Over the course of a three-hour interview at a busy chain restaurant in Marina del Rey, Mr. Block becomes increasingly pointed as he responds to the claims of his adversaries, finally adopting a whiny, snivelling tone to mimic his critics’ condemnations.

“The company is saying ‘you don’t understand the tree business.’ The analysts say ‘oh, he doesn’t understand our industry,’” he says.

“You know what industry I do understand pretty well, it turns out? The fraud industry. So I don’t need to know trees to know fraud,” he says.

Sino-Forest insists it is no fraud, and charges Mr. Block’s “inaccurate, spurious” report was aimed at generating big profits from his short position in the company’s shares.

Canada’s capital markets have rarely encountered a character like Carson Block: Irreverent, elusive, and able to devastate a Chinese company’s share price with a single research report.

As a naysayer to the Chinese equity boom, he has fouled the punch bowl at a party that many investors hoped would be the next big thing. His work has cast a pall over the hundreds of Chinese companies that have flocked to North American markets in recent years promising investors a way to cash in on China’s roaring economy.

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Mr. Block has shown that at least some of these businesses are not what they claim to be. Over the past 13 months, his Muddy Waters reports – which rely on his own business experience in China as well as unconventional investigation tactics (such as misrepresenting himself in face-to-face and telephone discussions with Chinese companies), have shattered the share price of most of his targets. Some, including Rino International Corp. and China MediaExpress Holdings Inc., have been delisted from major U.S. exchanges.

Of course, his work has also been a profitable venture for Mr. Block, who compiles short positions in the companies he reports on, ready to cash in as their stocks decline.

A Chinese education

So how is it that a 35-year-old former lawyer, and aficionado of 1990s gangster rap rivals Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G., has been able to ferret out questionable corporate activity that eluded so many other equity analysts and high-profile investors? In the case of Sino-Forest, for example, all seven analysts who covered the company rated the stock a “buy” before Mr. Block published his report.

“I know a lot more about … China than these [analysts] will ever know,” he says.

Mr. Block, it turns out, has had his own business troubles in the Middle Kingdom. In 2008, amid the global financial crisis, he launched a self-storage business in Shanghai called Love Box Storage. The venture, which still has just one location, has struggled to secure property leases, strike joint ventures with Chinese companies, and deal with employee issues. Love Box has been pulled back from the brink of financial failure on no less than four occasions.

Its challenges, Mr. Block says, have served as expensive tuition in the school of doing business in China, and have given him an advantage over other North American equity analysts trying to evaluate Chinese companies.

“These guys are like sheep to the slaughter. How do I know? I once was one. I lost a lot of money in China through hard lessons, as did most entrepreneurs I know there, before I really understood where the pitfalls are,” he says.

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“I’ve lost the kind of money in China that might make some of these guys throw themselves off a building. That’s how I understand what is going on.”

He says he learned how “easily perceptions can be manipulated in China,” particularly the perceptions of Western business people. China, he says, “is the toughest market to do business in the world. The moment you show you are making money you have 10 competitors knocking off your business model.”

On a humid weekday afternoon, Mr. Block has chosen The Cheesecake Factory to meet at. Perched above a local yacht club, it serves not only cheesecake, but also weighty portions of just about anything else typically found on a casual dining menu in the U.S.

He has arrived early, and by the time we meet has already consumed a Cobb salad and a mug of iced tea. We decide to switch to beer.

Mr. Block is dressed casually in a blue pinstriped dress shirt worn, tails out, over faded jeans. His speech is just as relaxed as his dress and peppered with popular slang. He says “dude” a lot.

Muddy Waters, which takes its name not from the American blues legend but the Chinese proverb “muddy waters make it easier to catch fish,” does not maintain a permanent office. When I ask him for his business card, Mr. Block says he doesn’t have one.

“It’s not a ‘too fly’ thing,” he explains. “It’s just generally I don’t want people to know.”

That’s a bit incongruous, given how many people now know about Carson Block. By going after Sino-Forest, which once boasted a market value of more than $6-billion and major shareholders that included legendary hedge fund manager John Paulson (his fund has since unloaded its stake), he is taking his game to another level. Before his report, Sino-Forest’s market value was larger than the combined value of all the other companies he has targeted.

Playing with the big boys

“This is the big leagues,” says the former high-school baseball and football player. “These guys have a lot of money.” In addition, he notes, “[Canada] is a totally different market where nobody knows us and

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we don’t have credibility. We know there will be immense pressure for somebody to be prosecuted so we have to be very careful to make sure we do not overstep. We know with some bad breaks we might be looking at the wrong end of that gun, so to speak. We went into Sino-Forest prepared to go to war.”

Whether or not Mr. Block and Muddy Waters overstepped with the sensational June 2 report remains an open question, and in due course the company could disprove its critics. The forestry firm, whose share price has plunged to below $5 from more than $20, has strongly denied the allegations and initiated an independent investigation headed by PricewaterhouseCoopers to produce a report on the company’s finances, assets and business practices. It is expected to take several months.

In the meantime, questions remain. An on-the-ground investigation in China by The Globe and Mail found discrepancies in Sino-Forest’s public statements regarding its timber holdings. A key Sino-Forest partner in Yunnan Province as well as Chinese forestry officials said the company controls far less timber than it has claimed. Sino-Forest disputes The Globe report.

The Ontario Securities Commission has said it is also investigating “matters related” to Sino-Forest and Mr. Block says he wants to help the regulator and co-operate fully with the inquiry.

He won’t, however, disclose the size of his Sino-Forest short position or whether he’s already culled any profits from the stock selloff.

“None of the Ferraris in the parking lot belong to me,” he says.

Indeed, when the restaurant valet hands him his keys Mr. Block climbs into a late-model Toyota Camry and speeds off into the fading light of another comfortable Los Angeles evening.

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* * * * * * * * * *

C U R R I C U L U M V I TA E

PERSONAL

• 35 years old• Grew up in the wealthy Manhattan suburb of Summit, N.J. Was

“No. 1 in class in parties hosted during junior and senior year,” he says.

• Permanent residency: Unknown

EDUCATION

• 1998: Earned a business degree from the University of Southern California, where he also studied Chinese.

• 2002-05: Earned a degree from Chicago-Kent College of Law.

CAREER HIGHLIGHTS

• 1998: Moved to Shanghai to try to start a Chinese equity-focused research firm.

• 1999: Worked at L.A. office of CIBC World Markets.• 1999-2001: Joined father William Block’s firm WAB Capital.• 2005: Returned to Shanghai to join the corporate practice of U.S.

firm Jones Day.• 2007: Left law firm to start a Singapore-based wealth

management business. Stayed in Shanghai to co-author Doing Business in China for Dummies.

• 2008: Launched troubled Shanghai self-storage business, Love Box.

FIRST COMPANY REPORT

• June 28, 2010: Muddy Waters alleges Orient Paper Inc. is a fraud. Before publishing, Block and his business partner buy $4,000 worth of Orient Paper “put” options. “I think the total profits on the trade were like $5,000 to $7,000. I didn’t make [much] on that,” he says.

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* * * * * * * * * *

I N H I S O W N W O R D S

On his newfound notoriety:

“It is a very strange moment in my life. When I look in my inbox there are probably about 10 interview requests. It would be nice to be able to spread that out over a lifetime and not just have this one period of intense interest and then fade back into obscurity.”

On Canadian retail investor reaction vs. Americans:

“I don’t think you guys have sent me any death threats. I don’t know, maybe it’s because you don’t have enough guns in your country. I haven’t got the death threats I usually get.”

On his future opportunities:

“Manage other people’s money or keep it the way it is? Publish or don’t publish? These are questions I’m trying to answer right now. If there were a time to evolve this into something more than doing single stock research, I guess this would be the time.”

On disguising himself in a one-on-one meeting with Sino-Forest’s head of investor relations:

“I even combed my hair forward for a ‘Dumb and Dumber’ kind of look. I tried to sound really dumb and speak even more slowly than usual. I went in with a rumpled appearance. I just tried to seem like an idiot.”

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IAN TELFER

The outsider who’s definitely in; He admits he was no scholar and just barely squeaked into business school. But

Ian Telfer could teach the brainiacs a thing or two

ANDY HOFFMAN28 May 2011

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Vancouver — Ian Telfer was a screw-up.

The Canadian mining industry luminary didn’t exactly excel during his undergraduate days in university. He was too busy having fun.

So at 25, after doing some travelling and bouncing around at entry-level jobs for a few years, he was exceedingly grateful to have been accepted (at the absolute last moment with two days until classes) to the University of Ottawa’s MBA program.

“I was not cum laude,” he smirks with a creviced grin.

So appreciative was Mr. Telfer, in fact, that he has since created a scholarship awarded annually to the program entrant with the lowest university marks.

Despite a playful and self-deprecating sense of humour, the unusual academic endowment isn’t just a lark. It tells you all you need to know about the 65-year-old’s sense of self and his place among Canada’s corporate elite.

It has taken a while, but since receiving his MBA from the business school (which now bears his name), Mr. Telfer has done rather well for himself. In the last decade, he’s become fabulously wealthy, having had a hand in creating a series of mining companies now valued at more than $50-billion. The most significant among them is Goldcorp Inc. , the world’s second largest gold producer by market capitalization, where he remains chairman.

Mr. Telfer is lean, well over six feet tall with high cheekbones highlighting sharp-features and full silver pompadour. Tastefully attired in a light-grey suit and alizarin checked shirt, his facade screams corporate establishment.

Yet Ian Telfer doesn’t count himself among the business elite. As far as he is concerned, he is still that screw-up with the crummy marks, who was given a break and has made the most of it. Over the years, he’s gone head-to-head with the Bay St. and Wall St. bluebloods and has finally earned a seat at the table.

“I’ve met all the guys who went to Harvard now. I’ve negotiated against Goldman Sachs. I’ve worked with the guys who got into Western,” he says.

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Top marks in mining

Considering his deal record, there is little doubt that he is a formidable negotiator, but Mr. Telfer’s personality differs from most of the hard-driving types who excel in the mining sector. He is much more easy-going and quick with a laugh. Armed with a formidable intellect, a natural curiosity makes him keen to listen and learn.

“I think my whole experience has made me very conscious of trying to be open-minded. I don’t go into any business situation with the assumption that I’ve got the answer and the other person doesn’t,” he says.

Gifted with these traits, he has worked alongside some of the biggest names in the mining business during a 34-year career. In the 80s he moved to Brazil and learned Portuguese while in the executive suite with multi-billionaire Eike Batista at one-time high flyer and eventual flameout TVX Gold. Next, he hooked up on a Venezuelan gold play with the man widely viewed as the consummate mining promoter, Robert Friedland. That company, called Vengold, did not end well.

Mr. Telfer doesn’t fall in love with the rocks. After all, he’s a trained accountant, not a geologist. It’s about making money for shareholders (and himself). So when tech stocks were commanding insane valuations Mr. Telfer turned Vengold into a so-called “Internet incubator,” providing backing for startups. It worked. For a while. After a pop in the stock from pennies to about $5 a share, a severe lack of revenue became a severe problem. Soon, itemus went bankrupt.

Then came the lunch that would change his life. Ten years ago to the week that we are breaking bread, he met mining financier Frank Giustra for a midday meal. There, they hatched a plan to create a new gold miner that was to be called Wheaton River Minerals Inc. The company bought a ragtag collection of unloved mines using unconventional financing and rolled them together to create a mid-sized producer, seemingly overnight. The rest is the stuff of junior mining legend as Wheaton rode rebounding gold prices and a series of gutsy acquisitions to merge with Goldcorp, a company founded by another vaunted resource entrepreneur, Rob McEwen.

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Despite the business companions he’s kept, Mr. Telfer doesn’t see himself as a farsighted prophet like his former partners.

“I’m more of an opportunist than a visionary,” he explains.

Top of the heap

And while he still may see himself as an interloper in the global business theatre, he is certainly an alpha among the big dogs of the Vancouver corporate pack.

We are lunching at Il Giardino. Of course we are. The ridiculously overpriced Italian eatery has (too) long been the default spot for power noshing on the left coast. Its tables have propped up the paperwork for the shakiest of junior mining plays. The tome of a wine list has fuelled the most creative of mining mergers, financings and compensation schemes. In Vancouver, Il Giardino is as establishment as it gets.

About five metres away from our table sits Peter Brown, the founder and chairman of Canaccord Financial, holding court over a group of brokers and investment bankers. Mr. Telfer is a friend to most of the suits (sans tie, as per the Vancouver dress code) in the restaurant today, including Mr. Brown, who has banked many of his deals. They pop by the table to pay their respects or offer a wink and familiar nod as he digs in to his appetizer, a caprese salad of tomatoes, basil and buffalo mozzarella ($19.95).

The deal maker

With the help of these and other Vancouver comrades, Mr. Telfer has helped create a gaggle of mining firms during the last 10 years. Some, like Wheaton River and the silver stream spinoff Silver Wheaton Corp., have been home runs and made Mr. Telfer and shareholders scads of money. Others, including the unimaginatively named Gold Wheaton have been duds. The jury is still out on many more, including Uranium One Inc. , which has failed to live up to its initial hype and where Mr. Telfer is also chairman. There was also Peak Gold (another team effort with Mr. Giustra) which, as an underperformer, was pushed into a merger to create what is now called New Gold Inc.

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Not every mining deal can be the next Wheaton River, Mr. Telfer concedes. But with each venture he’s created jobs. Blue-collar ones for miners and white-collar ones for executives. Of this, he is proud.

Whether it be in Guatemala, Africa or Vancouver, “the best thing you can give someone is a job,” he says.

And for a city’s economy, what is the value of a head office?, he asks rhetorically, listing off the services that each one consumes and the positive economic on Vancouver.

He clearly has a deep affinity for the rainy city. Like his wealth, he found it rather late in life, moving here in 1993. But it is the place where he has truly excelled. And if there is one thing that Ian Telfer can appreciate, it’s a place that gives a guy a second chance.

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* * * * * * * * * *

C U R R I C U L U M V I TA E

PERSONAL

• Age: 65; Born: Oxford, England. Father was an RAF pilot (later an accountant) and mother was a teacher from Moose Jaw

• Moved to Canada when he was two. Family lived in Moose Jaw for five years before settling in the Downsview area of Toronto, where he grew up.

FAMILY & EDUCATION

• Married for 34 years to Nancy Burke, two children ages 27 and 23• BA, political science, University of Toronto• MBA, University of Ottawa• Professional designation: chartered accountant

CAREER

• Current titles: Chairman of Goldcorp, Uranium One, and World Gold Council

• Former titles: CEO of Goldcorp and Wheaton River• Other mining firms he’s helped launch: Terrane Minerals (spun

off from and then merged with Goldcorp), Tahoe Resources, Peak Gold (merged with New Gold), UrAsia Energy (now Uranium One), Primero Mining

• Number of countries in which he’s had passport stamped: 80• Business hits: Wheaton River (Goldcorp), Silver Wheaton.• Business misses: Gold Wheaton, Vengold, itemus Inc.

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* * * * * * * * * *

I N H I S O W N W O R D S

On being told there was a groundswell of opposition to Goldcorp’s takeover of Glamis Gold in 2006

– “I’ve talked to t1he ground and there is no swell.”

Andy Hoffman

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STANLEY MA

An empire served on a plastic tray; Food-court king Stanley Ma controls almost 1,900 restaurants, but he insists a nationwide clientele is no buffer against a recession

RICHARD BLACKWELL8 October 2011

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Montreal — Stanley Ma surveys the food-court lunch choices at the Place Vertu shopping mall in suburban Montreal, noting that seven of the 20 or so fast-food outlets are brands owned by his company, MTY Food Group Inc. But he refuses to say which one of them he likes best.

“My brands are my children,” he says. And like a good parent, he doesn’t play favourites.

Instead, I have to make the decision where we’ll eat, opting for Kim Chi, MTY’s Korean food chain where meals are cooked on the spot on a sizzling wok. Mr. Ma has a spicy noodle dish, mixed with strips of beef and vegetables, and a bottle of water.

As we settle into the plastic food-court chairs and tuck into our meals amidst the din of a weekday lunch hour, Mr. Ma muses on what makes a successful fast-food concept in an age where choice, value, health and marketing are all factors in attracting fickle customers. While we talk, he discreetly eyes other patrons seated nearby, checking to see what people are eating, whether they finish their meals, and if they seem pleased with the experience.

He should know what works. The soft-spoken entrepreneur has quietly built a vast cross-country stable of fast-food restaurants, including well-known brands such as Cultures, Thai Express, Yogen Fruz, and Country Style. A serial acquirer, he has just bought smoothie purveyor Jugo Juice, is completing a deal to buy the Koryo Korean Barbeque chain, and will soon close his biggest acquisition ever – the iconic but dated Mr. Sub sandwich chain, which has deep roots in Ontario.

With more than two dozen brands and operations across Canada and the Middle East, the MTY restaurants sold food and drink worth $462-million in 2010. Most are franchised, and the royalties and fees contributed to MTY’s revenue of $67-million in 2010 – still small compared with huge rivals such as Tim Hortons or McDonald’s.

While MTY’s revenue and profit have been growing very steadily, Mr. Ma acknowledges that the company had a tough time in 2009 and early 2010 because of the economy, and could again if there’s another dip. “We are not recession-proof,” he says.

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Despite his growing empire, Mr. Ma remains modest, even self-effacing. “I’m a low-key person,” he says. “I don’t really look for a high profile. I’m a simple person who is passionate about what I do.”

From his offices in a low-slung industrial building in a non-descript industrial area of St. Laurent, he quietly controls almost 1,900 restaurants, giving him a strong sense for changing public tastes – at least when it comes to fast food.

There is no question customers are increasingly demanding, Mr. Ma says, as he deftly lifts his noodles with disposable chop sticks. Patrons are looking for healthier fare, high quality and – particularly in a food-court setting – a multitude of specialized choices.

Indeed, when we had queued up for our meals, the next person in line had asked that the cook use less oil in the wok to make his stir-fry, and another customer returned his plate, unsatisfied with the way it was cooked.

“The bar is definitely higher,” Mr. Ma said. “People are now very knowledgeable and [want] healthy food.”

A couple of decades ago, a food-court customer was most often a shopper taking a break, and they would have had to make do with a hamburger, pizza slice, or single Chinese food offering. Now, food courts are destinations for office workers, and they want coffee from a specialty outlet, a salad from a salad place, and choices that include Korean, Chinese, Thai, Indian, and Italian.

But competing in today’s bustling food court means more than just providing a wide range of appetizing food, Mr. Ma says. The signage, overall look, and brand recognition of each outlet are crucial in drawing in customers and keeping them away from competitors. In a mall setting, eating decisions are made in a few seconds, so location and visual appeal are key, as is price.

Mr. Ma came to Canada from Hong Kong as a teenager in 1968, and while he initially worked at odd jobs, his goal was to open a restaurant. In 1979 that dream came true when he started Le Paradis du Pacifique, a Chinese-Polynesian full-service eatery in Laval, just north of Montreal.

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It was a successful money-spinner, but after a few years, he figured that franchised fast-food restaurants might provide an even better return. In 1983 he launched his first mall-based Chinese food outlet – Tiki-Ming, a chain that now has four dozen locations.

One reason he embraced the franchise concept – only a tiny percentage of the outlets are run directly by MTY – was to open the door for other ambitious newcomers. “I realized that there are many immigrants like myself who were looking for opportunities. If [opening a restaurant] was good for me it should be good for other people,” he said.

Now, it costs about $250,000 to get an MTY franchise, and store owners pay royalties of around 5 to 6 per cent of sales to MTY.

MTY has created some of its chains – such as KimChi – from scratch, but much of its growth has come from acquisitions.

Until the Mr. Sub purchase, the biggest buy was the 490-outlet Country Style coffee chain, which MTY bought in 2009 for $16.5-million. The big challenge ahead is Mr. Sub, the Ontario-based chain of sub shops that has been around for more than four decades, but has been hit hard in recent years by stiff competition from Subway and Quiznos.

Mr. Ma is loath to give away details of his plans before the $23-million acquisition closes, but he says Mr. Sub’s strong brand is definitely worth revitalizing. One option may be to use the Mr. Sub name within the Country Style stores as the brand for its deli sandwich offerings.

There will be more acquisitions in the future, Mr. Ma says between bites of his Kim Chi noodles, although he takes an opportunistic approach and waits patiently for deals that complement MTY’s current operations or fill in gaps in the product line.

The consummate promoter, as we finish our lunch he’s keen to get me to sample the wares from one of his most recent purchases. “Would you like a Jugo Juice?” he says. “It’s a healthy drink.”

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C U R R I C U L U M V I TA E

ROOTS

• Born in Hong Kong; now 63 years old.• Came to Montreal in 1968 as a teenager.• Worked at odd jobs until he opened his first restaurant in 1979.

PERSONAL

• All three of his children work at MTY, two in Montreal and one in Toronto.

• Brother is a heart surgeon in Montreal.• Doesn’t really like to cook.

GROWTH

• Started with full-service restaurant Le Paradis du Pacifique, in Laval, north of Montreal.

• Opened first fast-food restaurant, Tiki Ming in 1983.• Had about 70 restaurants by the time MTY went public in 1995.

FAST-FOOD EMPIRE

• MTY brands include: Mr. Sub, Country Style, Thai Express, Yogen Fruz, TCBY, Cultures, Tiki-Ming, Jugo Juice, Vanelli’s, Tandori, KimChi, TacoTime, Sukiyaki, Koya, Sushi Shop, Vieux Duluth, Chick ‘n Chick, Franx Supreme, Koryo and several others.

MANAGEMENT STYLE

• Visits Toronto every two weeks to meet with his operations team and tour restaurants.

• Flies to Western Canada every two months or so to check on Western operations.

• The Globe and Mail Division of Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc.

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DAVID DODGE

Black coffee spiked with exasperation; The former governor of the Bank of Canada speaks bluntly about politicians who

promise ‘impossible’ economic plans

JACQUIE McNISH10 September 2011

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Toronto — David Dodge is not inclined to hold his tongue.

Three years after he retired as Governor of the Bank of Canada to take up the life of a corporate director and law firm adviser, the plain-spoken Mr. Dodge has emerged as a stern voice of economic reason in a time of financial upheaval.

There are no shortage of economic critics in these difficult times, but what makes Mr. Dodge a unique scold is that he is the former head of the Bank of Canada, a sober institution from which leaders are expected to retire into quiet obscurity. He has not only broken tradition with his predecessors, but he is also something of a maverick in his Ottawa home base where public sector voices have gone quiet under the Conservative government.

During a recent early morning breakfast meeting in the Toronto office of his law firm Bennett Jones LLP, he says it is “unfortunate” that most senior civil servants have “hidden a bit,” from the long-standing tradition of speaking their minds about public policies in speeches, public hearings or committee sessions.

“I believe that Canadian citizens are more intelligent and more able to deal with things than the political operators believe. The foundation of a good public policy is really an open dialogue and open debate.”

That discussion has never been more important than today, he says, because trust in public and private sector institutions has been shaken by three years of economic turmoil.

“People are searching for the right answers,” he says.

Anyone who plans to share a meal with Mr. Dodge should probably eat first. He unleashes such a torrent of thought-provoking and passionate arguments that food becomes an afterthought. Which is another way of saying that muffins prepared for our morning meal will remain wrapped on his desk and the fighter pilot black coffee mostly untouched.

Sporting the standard civil service outfit of khaki pants, blue jacket and brown shoes, he serves up an unusual blend of tart critiques wrapped in such folksy exclamations as “Holy Smokes!” or “That’s bananas.” Close your eyes and you could be listening to an episode of A Prairie Home Companion.

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What’s bananas in Mr. Dodge’s book is a lack of global co-operation and “stupid” political theatrics, particularly in the United States, which are preventing the world’s leaders and financial authorities from getting on with the business of fixing global economic imbalances. The global co-operation that worked so well during the 2008 meltdown, he says, has “lost momentum.”

At the same time, the list of economic ailments is growing. China’s currency is artificially low. In Europe and North America, households are bogged down by debts, job growth is stalled and governments are burdened with too much debt. Add it all up, he says, and “clear and real economic growth is not in the cards for some time.”

How bad will it get? To this question, Mr. Dodge responds with another: “Are we in North America and Europe facing a Japanese decade?” The question will not be directly answered, but his implication is clear: Most of the industrialized world is a long way from economic recovery.

Canada has been insulated from the worst of the economic carnage, thanks to its strong banking system and robust GDP, but he sees tougher times ahead. Much of the country’s resource-based economy has been stoked by strong commodity prices, which “won’t go on forever” as global economies sputter.

A more intractable problem is the country’s waning manufacturing base in Ontario. The underpinnings of the province’s core industrial sector have been eroding for decades. Plants here can’t compete with the lower wage markets of the Southern U.S. states and emerging countries. Compounding matters, long-term investment in more efficient plants and equipment has been anemic. The deterioration was masked for years by the competitive advantage of a depressed loonie and overheated demand in the United States, particularly in the past decade.

Given the current strength of the Canadian currency and fragility of the U.S. economy, he says, “we in Ontario are in an extremely difficult position.”

The worst of it, he says, is that none of the province’s three political parties appear willing to admit that jobs and corporate tax revenues are at potentially at risk. More disconcerting are the absence of viable economic strategies and incentives to attract manufacturing investment.

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His most pointed criticisms are directed at Ontario’s three political leaders who are campaigning for an October election. Each leader, he warns, is promoting “impossible” economic plans that unrealistically promise lower taxes and improved services for a province that he believes is facing a shrinking tax revenue base.

“Whoever wins will be seen to have lied to the public,” he said.

It was this kind of sharp criticism that earned Mr. Dodge his first job in the federal public service in the early 1970s. Back then, he was an economics professor at Queen’s University who had a lot to say about the federal government’s indirect subsidies to workers in the Atlantic provinces. At the time, the system allowed workers to claim unemployment benefits within weeks of losing work, reducing the incentive for people to look for jobs. “I was very upset. … It was nuts.”

Listening to his barbed analysis was deputy finance minister Simon Reisman, who hired him as the first employee in the department’s new social policy division. One of his mandates was to rethink the federal unemployment insurance system.

It was the beginning of a three-decade career in public service that would see Mr. Dodge tackle some of the country’s thorniest economic issues, including inflation, tax reform, free trade, and Canada’s 1976 entry to Group of Seven leading industrialized countries. By the time he was appointed Governor of the Bank of Canada, he had served as a deputy minister in the Finance and Health departments for 11 years.

For most Dodge watchers, his biggest accomplishment was his work with in the 1990s with then-Finance Minister Paul Martin to balance Canada’s bloated federal deficit. He says the politically fraught assignment of cutting federal costs would not have been possible had then-Prime Minister Jean Chrétien not had “the trust of Canadians that he was doing the right thing by pursuing fiscal restraint.”

That trust is even more important today if provinces such as Ontario have a hope of imposing the government service cuts and rolling out economic incentives that he believes are necessary to rebuild its aging manufacturing sector.

“I’m the last person to sound all gloom and doom, but I think governments can only do difficult things in public policy if they have the trust of the people.”

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C U R R I C U L U M V I TA E

FAMILY

• Born in June, 1943.• The son of a Toronto shoe polish manufacturer, his first job was

working in the factory’s payroll office.• He and his wife Christiane have two daughters, three

grandchildren, and homes in Ottawa, Toronto and Perth, Ont.

PUBLIC SECTOR

• After earning his PhD in economics at Princeton, started out as an economics professor at Queen’s University in 1968.

• His sharp criticisms of federal unemployment policies earned him a job in 1972 as a researcher with the Department of Finance.

• Over the next 36 years, held a variety of senior posts, including Deputy Minister of Finance, in various departments.

• Named Governor of the Bank of Canada in 2001.

PRIVATE SECTOR

• After leaving the Bank of Canada in 2008, he accepted a job as an adviser to Bennett Jones.

• Named Chancellor of Queen’s University in 2008.• Boardroom posts include Bank of Nova Scotia and Canadian

Utilities Ltd. Personal• His favourite place to unwind is his sprawling farm in Perth,

where he and his wife spend most weekends.• Although he no longer breeds cattle, he keeps busy repairing

fences and cutting hay. His hobby is carpentry and cabinet making.

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I N H I S O W N W O R D S

On leaving the Bank of Canada during a time of global financial stress

“You sleep better at night because you’re not carrying the burden of it.”

On what he misses about the Bank of Canada

“There is a huge difference. At the bank, I had 1,200 staff who were incredibly competent and diverse. Now I have one person, an economist, working with me.”

On the need to be vocal about economic policies

“During my time in the public service, I spent a lot of time talking in public to committees of the house and other forums. It was expected. At the time, it was part of the job. It is unfortunate that today that seems to be less the case federally.”

On the U.S. economy

“There is incredible political stupidity in the United States with this debt-reduction panel. It should take six to 10 years to fix the fiscal problems, but they are doing it too rapidly.”

The Globe and Mail Division of Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc.

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FELIX CHEE

A full plate and a discerning eye; China Investment Corp.’s man in Canada has spent billions here, but he turns away

many more pitches than he entertains

JACQUIE McNISH26 March 2011

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Toronto — Felix Chee appraises a platter of crisp, glistening fowl with a careful eye and then leans over the table to share a thought.

“The Peking Duck here is among the finest in the world,” he says, falling back into a chair at Toronto’s casually elegant Lai Wah Heen restaurant. “It is all about the freshness of the meat and the oil.”

Mr. Chee has made a career out of finding winning combinations. Ever since he and his wife Margaret immigrated to Canada from Singapore in 1974 with two suitcases and $5,000 in their pockets, the 64-year-old businessman has shown a talent for marrying foreign knowledge and money with local institutions.

He rose to prominence on Bay Street in the early 1980s as an innovative financial manager at Ontario Hydro, which was among the first to import then-exotic derivatives to Canada to reduce interest rate and currency risks on the utility’s bonds. More recently, Mr. Chee nudged China’s sovereign wealth fund to its most successful direct investment ever, when he convinced China Investment Corp. to bet $1.5-billion (U.S.) in 2009 on embattled Teck Resources Ltd. That investment is now worth $5.4-billion.

In January came “the highlight” of Mr. Chee’s career, when CIC opened a Toronto office with him at the helm as its chief representative. The world’s fifth-largest sovereign wealth fund, with $332-billion of assets, snubbed larger capital markets by opening its first non-Asian office here, putting Mr. Chee in a unique position to help build the fragile economic bridge that links Canada’s resource riches with the world’s fastest-growing major economy.

Mr. Chee says the new office partly reflects the gratitude of officials at state-owned CIC that Canada “is a welcoming place” for its investments. “They don’t want to be where they are not wanted.”

But people familiar with the fund say the location of the new office is also a gesture of thanks to Mr. Chee, who temporarily left his home and family in Oakville in 2008 to move to Beijing to help build the Chinese fund. During that time, he pushed CIC’s somewhat reluctant officials to shift their focus on resource investments from nearby Australia to Canada.

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It was his persistence that is credited with overcoming resistance in China – and on Teck’s board of directors – to a $1.5-billion equity investment that helped the Canadian mining company get out of financial trouble in 2009.

Mr. Chee, whose contract expires in 2014, said he has two remaining ambitions: He is on the hunt primarily for minority stakes in resource, infrastructure and real estate ventures that will deliver strong returns. But a bigger challenge is to dispel Western fears that CIC is a puppet of a centralized Chinese government seeking to control Canada’s valuable resources.

“Obviously there is a perception and concern about China and the controlling of resources,” says Mr. Chee. CIC, he says, is a “financial investor” and “it does not seek control” in any Canadian company.

Contrary to what some Westerners think, “China is not a monolith,” he continues. CIC is one of several state-owned entities that answer to a variety of different officials and they have devoted over $100-billion to acquire long-term interests in foreign companies and securities.

“Actions will speak louder than words. Hopefully by the transactions we do, it will help people here, the government, regulators, businesses and investors understand CIC and China much more. What we do will also be a template for how Chinese companies can invest abroad by thinking of all stakeholders.”

During a leisurely three-hour lunch of succulent duck crepes and tea, Mr. Chee speaks candidly in a deep, gravelly baritone about his career and his new mandate. He is tall and thin with a neatly shaved head, and when he stands he favours one leg, which was badly injured during a car accident last year that left him bedridden for months.

Mr. Chee’s background makes him uniquely suited to help nurture stronger business ties between China and Canada. A descendant of educated, middle-class Chinese from the southwestern Chinese province of Guizhou (his grandmother had bound feet), he was born and raised in Singapore and educated in Britain.

His upbringing gave him the advantage of seeing China through an international lens. And his successful career in Canada has earned him

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credibility with local bankers and directors who have little experience with Chinese investors.

This unique background was instrumental in “bridging the gap” between Teck’s board of directors and CIC when the mining company was scrambling to raise cash to pay huge debts that were coming due. Though Teck was in need, people familiar with the talks said some of its directors were concerned that CIC had a secret agenda to help one of China’s mining giants seize control of the Vancouver company.

“The takeover negotiations were 20 per cent [about] price and 80 per cent how to deal with China Inc.”

That Teck was hesitating at such a time of need frustrated some of CIC’s senior officials, sources say. They credit Mr. Chee for keeping talks open and eventually convincing both sides that the investment was in everyone’s interest.

That deal opened doors, too, to other resource companies that are willing to tap CIC’s huge pool of cash in exchange for selling a minority interest. Last year, CIC agreed to spend $1.2-billion to acquire a small stake in Penn West Energy Trust and help finance an oil sands venture. The deal is largely seen as a template for other foreign companies that are eager to invest in the Canadian oil sector without triggering nationalistic concerns.

Mr. Chee’s early experience as a project analyst at a Singapore bank taught him lessons that served him well in Canada. His job was to assess the viability of machinery purchased by business clients with banks loans. His insights earned him respect – and a seat on a number of company boards. Their struggles gave him a life-long appreciation of the importance of capital and the need to invest it efficiently.

When his new wife Margaret pushed to broaden their horizons, they chose to stake their future in North America’s booming economy. Canada became their home because of its more relaxed immigration policies.

He landed a job in research at Ontario Hydro by answering a want ad. At the sprawling provincial power utility, he found a bureaucratic

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organization that raised hundreds of millions of dollars to expand operations with little attention to modern financial disciplines, such as measuring returns on invested capital.

Early efforts to analyze Ontario Hydro’s capital programs met with resistance. A request to purchase a $180 Hewlett-Packard calculator was rejected as too costly (he bought it with his own money). He was forced to share a computer when writing software code to build programs that could assess liabilities and returns in the utility’s capital program.

“When my time was up, the computer would go ‘ding’ and my manager would yell my time was up,” he said.

When interest rates soared in the early 1980s, Mr. Chee’s skills became increasingly in demand. He introduced basic policies to stagger bond maturities to control the flow of cash. And he imported new financial tools such as swaps and options to shield against volatile interest and currency rates. Ontario Hydro was one of the first Canadian companies to employ the derivatives that are now standard in most corporations.

His success earned him senior posts at Manulife Financial and then the University of Toronto, where, starting in 2000, he was placed in charge of operations (“everything from campus police to finance and parking”). He also took the reins in the mid-2000s of the university’s endowment fund, leaving him with the task of overseeing a fund just as the bull market was running out of steam.

He decided to retire in early 2008 as the global meltdown was beginning. Although he is disappointed that the endowment fund took a heavy hit during the crisis, he says the charged political environment at the university “was good training for China.”

Mr. Chee said he timed his retirement to coincide with the pending birth of his first grandchild, who was due in September, 2008. Those plans changed when he got a call in May, 2008, from Beijing. The caller was Gao Xiqing, a senior Chinese banking and regulatory official, who months earlier had been appointed vice-chairman and president of CIC.

The two men had never spoken before, but Mr. Gao had learned of Mr. Chee’s reputation and wanted to hire him immediately as his adviser to help navigate investment pitches that were being thrown at a giant new fund born during a credit crunch.

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“They were being bombarded with pitches,” Mr. Chee said. “Everyone wanted to be in China. Everyone wanted a relationship with China and CIC was seen as a door in.”

Everyone, that is, except Mr. Chee, who initially hesitated to join CIC in Beijing because of his new grandchild.

“I wanted to be here,” he says, reaching into his pocket to pull out a photo of his beaming granddaughter, now 2.

The one-year-old CIC fund was willing to wait for the new grandfather. In October, 2008, Mr. Chee left his family behind and moved into temporary quarters in Beijing to help launch China’s largest investment fund. In the end, the opportunity was just too difficult to turn down.

“Not many people get to be part of a $200-billion startup.”

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C U R R I C U L U M V I TA E

BEGINNINGS

• Born and raised in Singapore, where his grandmother ran a girls’ school. His family lived at the school for his first six years.

• Lives with his wife Margaret in Oakville, Ont. They have one adult daughter and a two-year-old granddaughter. Mr. Chee is 64 years old.

PASTIMES

• Son of an auto service shop owner, he has had a life-long passion for cars. In his spare time, he drives a limited edition BMW Z-series roadster, the same make featured in two James Bond movies.

• He has a cottage in the Kawartha Lakes region.

EDUCATION

• Bachelor of technology, industrial engineering, Loughborough University, England.

• Master of Science, Imperial College, London.• MBA, York University, Toronto, Ontario.

CAREER

• 1975-1993: Ontario Hydro, various positions, culminating in senior vice-president, financial.

• 1993-2001: Treasurer, chief investment officer, Manulife Financial Corp.

• 2001-2008: Various posts including chief financial officer, University of Toronto, and CEO of its asset management arm, UTAM.

• 2008-2011: Adviser to China Investment Corp. president.• Since 2011: Chief representative of CIC Toronto office.

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P I T C H I N G F E L I X

Lots of folks have pitched investment proposals at Felix Chee, but few understand what the sovereign fund is looking for. Some arrive with thick deal books stuffed with investment proposals “hoping that something will stick,” he said. Others come with problems they want to solve with China Investment Corp.’s money.

So far, CIC has made only two major public investments in Canadian companies, Teck Resources Ltd. and Penn West Petroleum Ltd. Its biggest North American investments have been a $3-billion (U.S.) minority stake in Blackstone Group and a $5-billion purchase of a 9.9-per-cent stake in Morgan Stanley. Those U.S. investments ignited criticism in China that the fund was making a risky bet on troubled Wall Street. That opposition, Mr. Chee said, has put enormous pressure on CIC’s managers.

Before you pay a visit to CIC’s Toronto office, consider what Mr. Chee is looking for: “If I can check the following three boxes, there is a pretty good chance I am going to make an investment.”

1. The investment should have the potential for a decent return.2. There should be a China component to the transaction so that

the deal provides some benefit to businesses or professionals back home. Teck fits this bill because it sells a share of its minerals to China.

3. The transaction should be structured in a way that enhances outsiders’ perceptions of China.

Jacquie McNish

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EILEEN MERCIER

She’s no teacher’s pet; Outspoken and blunt, the chairwoman of Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan isn’t afraid

to break ranks with clubby Corporate Canada

JACQUIE McNISH14 May 2011

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Any doubts about Eileen Mercier’s ability to manage a life crammed with half a dozen boardroom posts, nine children and 20 grandchildren are dispelled shortly after she steps into her elegant Toronto condo.

Delayed by a faulty parking door at Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, the chairwoman of Canada’s third-largest pension fund quickly makes up for lost time by getting down to business in her kitchen. Hands are washed and a battery-operated can opener is put to work beheading tins of tuna while she pulls mayonnaise, bread and lettuce from the fridge.

As Ms. Mercier gathers plates and assembles sandwiches, she rhymes off decades-old details about her upbringing and career. She pauses only to wag a finger when sharing some wisdom.

“My mother always said if you want to get something done, give it to a busy person,” she said of the former operating room nurse. “It’s all about multitasking.”

The kitchen is Ms. Mercier’s control room. It is where she cooks large family dinners for more than 20 on Sunday nights and keeps a small wooden desk to manage her work at Teachers and five other boards. She has opted for a lunch interview here for the practical reason that most of the city’s restaurants are “too noisy, you can barely hear anything.”

And Ms. Mercier likes to be heard. She has made her mark as a forthright financial executive who, behind the scenes, has stood up to some of Canada’s most adventurous entrepreneurs, including Reichmanns and Aspers, pushing them to downsize, restructure or refinance their leveraged businesses. For the past 16 years, she has been a blunt and vocal conscience on more than two dozen boards, challenging executives and directors when she believes salaries are exorbitant, financial results opaque or corporate behaviour too risky. Since 2007 she has chaired Canada’s most rambunctious pension fund, Teachers, which frequently signals its corporate displeasure by selling or preparing to sell such underperformers as BCE Inc. and Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment Ltd.

In the clubby world of Canadian business it is rare to see a prominent director break ranks. It is particularly unique to hear the criticism emanate from the small and self-conscious ranks of female directors.

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To Ms. Mercier, however, it is her status as an outsider that frees her to challenge boardroom orthodoxy.

Although she rarely speaks to reporters, in the winter of her 41-year career, she is becoming more outspoken about failings in corporate governance. When she was honoured with a Corporate Directors Fellowship Award in 2009 at a Toronto dinner, she deflected the praise and startled hundreds of assembled directors and executives by chastising the boardroom community for failing to avert the global financial crisis.

“We have experienced a governance failure of unheard-of proportions … The public at large clearly wants answers from us and wonders why we didn’t see what was coming and take steps to avoid it,” she told the elite corporate gathering.

Nearly two years later, she curls her hands into tight fists when recalling the speech. “I was angry,” she said. “I thought that given all that had happened in the crisis not enough blame or responsibility had been attributed to the boards. I felt it needed saying that some of the things were preventable and should have been prevented, and they weren’t.”

Ms. Mercier has never been a shrinking violet. She credits her late father, a flinty RCMP officer, and mother, a former nurse, “both of them very tough people,” with teaching her inner fortitude. When things got tough she says her father quoted the line “this isn’t cricket” from the Second World War prison camp film, The Bridge on the River Kwai.

“There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think of him and the way he faced things,” she says.

Initially Ms. Mercier applied her discipline to decoding such ancient languages as Old Norse as a graduate student at the University of Alberta. Turned off by the “politically charged” academic atmosphere, she parlayed her language skills into a job in 1970 as a writer for a monthly magazine published at the time by the Toronto Stock Exchange.

In 1972 she left the “dead end” writing post for a career as member of a new strategic team at Toronto-Dominion Bank. Then the runt of Canada’s Big Five banks, TD was also the most adventurous, meaning it was willing to bet that a rare female professional with limited experience was a good fit in its new venture capital division. At the bank, she says “I was a bit of an oddball.”

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TD Bank was so “anxious” about its experimental investing in start-up companies that it insisted she and other portfolio managers sit in on the board meetings of every company the bank was betting on. The front row seat gave her insights into boardroom conduct and governance while she was only in her twenties.

When she left the bank in 1978, Ms. Mercier had completed an MBA and married her first husband, Ernest Mercier, one of the bank’s rising stars. While he advanced to become one of the bank’s top executives (he died in 2002), Ms. Mercier built a career as a finance executive with some of Canada’s most capital-hungry companies, including CanWest Capital Corp., Gulf Canada Ltd. and Abitibi-Price Inc.

At CanWest, Ms. Mercier oversaw the new company’s U.S.-based pay television properties and talked herself out of a job when she convinced Izzy Asper that the U.S. television model didn’t fit with CanWest’s strategy. “He didn’t want to get rid of anything even though that company deserved getting rid of.”

The toughest assignment in her career came in 1987 when she was appointed treasurer of paper products giant Abitibi-Price Inc. “I didn’t know enough about the business to know that from the moment I walked in that things were going to get worse.”

What followed, Ms. Mercier said, was the “miserable business” of shrinking Abitibi-Price by selling divisions and chopping jobs. “You take it to heart, it is very hard to go through any of these things and not be affected.”

When the job was done in 1995, Ms. Mercier formed her own management company, named Finvoy, after her father’s Irish birthplace, to begin a new career as a corporate director.

She says directors today are much more serious and informed about their companies, but she says “it is a much harder job today” to be a director because businesses have become so much more complex and stakeholders more demanding.

Stealing a glance at her watch, she stands up, sweeps dirty plates off the table and gathers her belongings to head for another board meeting downtown.

Breaking into a broad smile, she tartly remarks: “This isn’t cricket.”

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C U R R I C U L U M V I TA E

BEGINNINGS

• Born in Toronto in 1947, and raised in Owen Sound and Sarnia, Ont., where her father, a plainclothes RCMP officer, was posted.

• Undergraduate BA in English from Waterloo Lutheran University.• Masters degree in English from University of Alberta.• MBA from York University.

PERSONAL

• First husband, Toronto-Dominion Bank executive vice-president Ernest Mercier, died 2002.

• In 2008, married Chuck Hantho, retired CEO of Canadian Industries Ltd. and Dominion Textiles. The couple share nine children and stepchildren and 20 grandchildren.

• Couple has condo in Toronto and country home in Quebec.

CAREER

• Brief foray as writer for the Toronto Stock Exchange in 1970, was appointed a portfolio manager at TD Bank’s new venture capital arm.

• In addition to post as chairwoman of Teachers, is a director of CGI Group, ING Bank of Canada, Intact Financial, Teekay Shipping and University Health Network of Toronto.

TOUGHEST ASSIGNMENT

• Joined paper-products giant Abitibi-Price in 1987 just as the fragmented industry was heading into a prolonged slump due to increased global competition, heavy debts and aging facilities. Ms. Mercier was part of team that had to sell and shrink divisions to keep the company afloat.

HOBBIES

• A life-long seamstress, she is currently sewing a christening gown for a granddaughter.

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BILL DOYLE

A mineral lover’s fighting words; Potash CEO unbothered by ‘lies, half-truths and rumours’ that surrounded BHP battle:

‘My skin is thicker than the bark on that tree’

JACQUIE McNISH29 October 2011

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Saskatoon — Almost a year to the day after Ottawa called a halt to the bruising 100-day Potash War, its victorious general has little interest in reliving old stories from the battlefield.

“It was an experience,” Bill Doyle allows when asked about BHP Billiton’s foiled bid to acquire Canada’s potash champion, Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan, where he has been chief executive officer since 1999.

But what about the nationalist outcry against the deal? The duel with BHP’s Marius Kloppers, whose hostile takeover attempt thrust Potash Corp. into a global spotlight? The stinging criticisms of Mr. Doyle’s decision to make his home in Chicago? Ottawa’s dramatic, 11th-hour rejection of the takeover bid?

“A distraction,” he says with a dismissive wave of his hand during our lunch at Truffles, a small bistro in downtown Saskatoon that specializes in local produce.

“People said a lot of things. Does that bother me?” He pauses before answering the question to look out a window overlooking 21st Street. Jabbing his finger toward the street, the silver-haired executive clenches his jaw and lowers his voice to a steely rumble: “My skin is thicker than the bark on that tree.”

The leafy metaphor is more apt than Mr. Doyle probably realizes. A call to Saskatoon’s city hall reveals that the thin, pale tree he singled out is an American Elm. Like Mr. Doyle, it is a foreigner. Just as the elm import was planted last year as part of a downtown urban renewal project, Mr. Doyle was recruited from a U.S. competitor in 1987 to revive a moribund and unprofitable Crown corporation.

The Illinois-born executive, who twice rejected a job offer from a U.S. potash company in the mid-1970s because “I couldn’t see myself out in the middle of Iowa selling fertilizer,” has over his 37-year career become one of the greatest proselytizers of the soft-pink mineral that is one of the Canadian Prairies’ greatest natural resources.

He eventually accepted a global sales job with International Minerals and Chemical Corp. (now part of Mosaic Co.) to see the world. His love of travel and unswerving faith in potash’s fertilizing power, which he calls a “noble business,” has helped elevate potash from a poorly understood mineral to a vital ingredient for boosting food supply.

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There wasn’t much nobility to be found at Potash Corp. 24 years ago when Mr. Doyle was recruited. He found a sickly provincial ward so crippled by years of losses that when he arrived, he says, the Saskatchewan government “was going broke.” Today it’s is a publicly traded company that has parlayed an ambitious global sales strategy and unique marketing co-operative into a global giant that boasts seven consecutive years of profits and generates hundreds of millions of dollars annually in royalties and taxes to the province.

Until last year, Mr. Doyle’s foreign status wasn’t much of an issue. Although he spends most of his time outside the province, moved his wife and three children from Saskatoon to a home in Winnetka, Ill., in 2002 and expanded an executive office near Chicago, local debate was subdued.

That changed last year when BHP came gunning for Potash Corp. Mr. Doyle’s U.S. tilt was ammunition in the hands of an Australian giant hoping to subdue a nationalist backlash. How could anyone object to a foreign takeover when several of Potash’s most senior executives were absentee landlords?

“Lies, half-truths and rumours,” retorts Mr. Doyle, blaming the misinformation on “the public relations campaign that was undertaken by the other side.” If Mr. Doyle has a home, he says, it is somewhere up in the air because he spends more than 200 days of the year travelling to visit foreign clients and governments who buy 95 per cent of the company’s potash for its fertilizing qualities.

To underline the point, he explains he has just returned from a six-week international tour, during which “there were no Saturdays” because he was so busy meeting with clients and governments. “It is really quite unbelievable how much I travel,” he says.

Complaints that other Potash executives moved south of the border are also misguided, he says, because they are constantly shuttling between Canada and the U.S., which accounts for 40 per cent of the company’s sales.

The thing to focus on is that the company is expanding, Mr. Doyle says. By 2013, its Saskatoon head office will increase its staff by 12 per cent to 2,500, slightly more than half its total global workforce of 5,400.

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The growth is being driven by a $7.8-billion expansion of Potash Corp.’s Canadian mining properties that are set to nearly double the company’s annual output to 17.1 million tonnes by 2015. “No company is going to grow faster than Potash Corp. in the next four years,” he says.

The investment is part of a $180-billion global expansion by major potash companies racing to add new capacity for a world that needs more nutrients to feed a rapidly growing population.

Mr. Doyle’s knows the food math by heart. The global population is 7 billion and every year it grows by 75 million people. To keep feeding everyone from a limited supply of arable land, he says the world will need 70-per-cent more food by 2050. That increased yield can only happen with increased fertilization.

“We have a real obligation to feed the world,” he says.

If there is a flaw in Mr. Doyle’s noble vision, it is that many of the world’s farmers and governments, notably in China and India, think potash companies are greedy. Potash Corp., which accounts for 20 per cent of global capacity, gets much of the heat because its Canpotex marketing alliance with competitors Mosaic and Agrium Inc. gives it enormous clout to set what some customers argue are unreasonably rich prices.

The complaints turned to outrage in 2008 when potash prices soared to a peak of $875 (U.S.) a tonne.

“It was too high,” Mr. Doyle concedes. He blames the “bravado” of Russian potash players, relatively new to the global potash market, for raising prices “too far, too fast” in 2008. Although prices have come down from their nose-bleed levels to about $475 a tonne, major buyers such as India are still squawking. India has effectively boycotted purchases from most major potash suppliers, including Potash Corp.

Although he describes the impasse with India as “a tragedy,” he said the days of brinksmanship are fading.

“The challenges of food production are so great that I think you’re going to see less game-playing going forward. It is important, we have to grow, there is a challenge here.”

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With such a huge global appetite for potash, does Mr. Doyle worry that another suitor may come calling?

“Who knows?” he says with a shrug. “We don’t think that way.”

A few minutes after answering this question, he realizes he is late for his next trip. He has a flight to catch for a meeting in Calgary. Later in the day, he will return to Saskatoon for a prostate cancer fundraiser.

“People don’t know what it takes to run this business,” he says over his shoulder, as he heads for the door.

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* * * * * * * * * *

C U R R I C U L U M V I TA E

ROOTS

• Born 1950, Highland Park, Ill.• Middle of five children. His father, a chemist, was head of R&D

at Colgate-Palmolive.

BEGINNINGS

• BA in government and music from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

• Supported himself through school as a bartender and golf caddy.• Disillusioned after volunteering in Chicago for George

McGovern’s ill-fated 1972 presidential campaign, he bought a BMW motorcycle and rode through 37 countries in 13 months. He survived by camping and working on farms in exchange for food.

CAREER

• 1974 – Joined International Minerals and Chemical Corp as roving global potash salesman.

• 1987 – Joined Potash Corp. as president of sales arm.• 1998 – Promoted chief operating officer.• 1999 – Named CEO.

PERSONAL

• Lives with his wife Kathy in Winnetka, Ill. They have three grown children.

• Owns a Saskatoon condo and a Caribbean vacation home.• An avid music fan with eclectic tastes that range from jazz to

piano concertos and rock and roll. Also golfs and scuba dives.

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JACYNTHE CÔTÉ

Aluminum, a love story: How perseverance paid off; With global economic storms subsiding,

Rio Tinto Alcan’s chief speaks of new beginnings for her company and the metal it makes

JACQUIE McNISH8 January 2011

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Montreal — My lunch with the CEO of one of Canada’s mining giants is in danger because I am failing a safety test.

Visitors entering the Montreal headquarters of Rio Tinto Alcan, a receptionist tartly informs me, cannot enter the building until they pass an “induction test.” I am ushered to a computer, where I watch a safety video and answer multiple-choice questions.

I ace every question except the last, which prompts the machine to freeze. What now? Eventually the computer, let’s call it Hal, spits out the answer, reluctantly it seems, and I am whisked into a hushed, wood-panelled dining room to meet a trim 52-year-old who heads one of the world’s largest producers of aluminum, bauxite and alumina.

Jacynthe Côté fixes me with a stern look when I confess my somewhat shaky grasp of emergency protocol. Tapping a plum fingernail on a glistening mahogany dining table the size of a small pond, she says: “It’s easy: When something goes wrong, follow me.”

Ms. Côté has been delivering that same message ever since she was appointed Rio Tinto Alcan’s chief executive officer in February, 2009. It was a job few could have wanted. The $38-billion takeover of Alcan in 2007 by London-based Rio Tinto PLC burdened the mining goliath with so much debt that it had to make what she calls “radical decisions” to slash 17,000 positions – 10 per cent of its global work force – and dozens of far-flung operations to survive a brutal worldwide recession.

In Canada, thousands of jobs were jettisoned, capital spending was frozen, capacity sharply reduced and divisions sold or permanently shuttered, including the Beauharnois aluminum smelter in Quebec, where Ms. Côté first attracted the attention of Alcan’s senior management in the late 1980s.

“It wasn’t easy,” Ms. Côté says. “Alcan was used to being the acquirer, not the acquiree. There was a lot of grief.” She turned employees away from their “suffering and whingeing” by visiting company divisions and delivering a sharp message: “There’s no time for that!”

In meetings and private talks, the blunt and unflappable executive compared the old Alcan to a deceased husband. Rio Tinto was the new spouse and as long as workers were collecting paycheques, she told them they had to make the best of the new marriage. “I would say: ‘Next

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Thursday you are going to get your paycheque deposited in your bank account. … this is your moment to get committed.’”

Paycheques were not Ms. Côté’s motivation to take the helm during the economic storm. Rather, it was her long history with the company and her deep-rooted faith in the future of its product. “I love aluminum,” she says of the malleable, lightweight and recyclable metal that has become the “It” material of new technologies including energy-efficient cars, solar panels and Apple’s new generation of MacBook Pro laptops.

Had she left, Ms. Côté said, “I would have probably felt I was letting them down.” By staying, she believed she could “minimize collateral damage” by relying on her experience and operational knowledge to protect the company’s most efficient operations, while closing the most outdated. What kept her going, she said, was a faith that “things could only improve.”

The dark times seem like distant history in the gilt-painted dining room that was once part of newspaper baron Lord Atholstan’s palatial home a century ago, and is now a wing in the sprawling complex of old and modern buildings that make up Rio Tinto Alcan’s headquarters on Sherbrooke Street.

Under the watchful portrait of Lady Atholstan, we sample plates of smoked salmon, pasta salads and Thai rolls, a selection of modern cuisine that seems appropriate for Ms. Côté’s pioneering leadership. She is the first female CEO in the company’s history and one of only two women on Rio Tinto’s nine-person executive committee. And one day before our lunch in late December, her promise of a new beginning at the beleaguered company took hold when Rio Tinto Alcan unveiled plans to invest more than $1-billion to modernize and expand smelters in Quebec and British Columbia.

“There’s more to come,” she says, breaking into a broad smile. Although she won’t discuss details, she suggests Rio Tinto Alcan has a “cautious” long-term plan in place to invest billions of dollars more to modernize and expand its Kitimat smelter in B.C. and new-technology centre in Quebec’s Saguenay region. When the projects are finished, foreign parent Rio Tinto will have fulfilled its takeover investment promises to Ottawa and the Canadian unit will operate the world’s lowest-cost and environmentally cleanest aluminum smelters.

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Ms. Côté would not be talking about any of these achievements if she had not made a decision in the early 1990s to throw her cautious management style to the wind. A senior Alcan executive she describes as her mentor sat her down at the time to tell her the company was so impressed with her management style and the efficiency gains she squeezed from aging aluminum operations in Quebec that they wanted to move her on to the executive fast track. At first, she says, she balked because she feared their expectations were too high. “I had a bit of concern about a risk of failing.”

She also worried that she would be overwhelmed by her busy corporate and home life with three young children at the time.

“There were some pretty frank conversations about what they were expecting … I felt they were pushy. They had to give me a break especially when I had kids; I would say ‘You’re killing me, everyone is killing me right now.’” Eventually, Alcan’s senior executives convinced Ms. Côté to make the leap. The turning point came during a conversation, which as Ms. Côté retells it, sounds like the stuff of management fairy tales.

“One of my mentors that I really trusted said: ‘We have a real consensus about what we think you can do. We think you can go for it. For that to happen you need to accept this and trust the organization.’” At that point, she says, “I kind of clicked. I just said to myself, ‘trust them, just give them a chance.’” The decision turbo-charged her career. She moved so quickly through a number of posts in Europe and in Alcan’s head office that when she arrived at a new job, her staff would joke it was time to prepare for a farewell party. By 2005 she was the chief executive officer of Alcan’s Bauxite and Alumina business group, a core division that put her in the running for the top job at Alcan.

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While women are rare in the senior ranks of major mining companies, Ms. Côté credits Alcan’s long-standing commitment to meritocracy and mentoring talented managers for her success. “Women were treated exactly the same as men.” So much so that prior to Rio Tinto’s takeover, four of Alcan’s senior executive team were women, including Cynthia Carroll, who left in 2007 to become the first female chief executive officer of London-based Anglo American PLC.

Although women are scarcer at Rio Tinto, she says she is comfortable with Alcan’s new owner because it shares a devotion to “excellence,” “good governance” and “disciplined” investments in projects.

“It feels like home.”

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* * * * * * * * * *

I N H E R W O R D S

Worst fears of the recession

“For me the worst period of the crisis was I was getting really worried about social instability. … I knew the aluminum price would recover. I knew what plants we had to shut down. … the big unknown was the social element. It got bad, but not that bad.”

Life with Rio Tinto

“Exploration was not our strength … we had about 15 geologists, now I have 400. It is Christmas every day because they find bauxite [aluminum ore].”

On being CEO

“Some people say: ‘I wouldn’t trade places with you for a fortune.’ I don’t have a gun at my head. I like what I am doing. It comes with a fairly big agenda. … I like the complexity, I like the volume, I like the speed, I like the long-term view it requires.”

On Ottawa’s rejection of BHP Billiton’s Potash takeover

“I think the principle of net plus value is very critical. … Countries need to be comfortable with how you operate … There are lessons for all involved.”

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* * * * * * * * * *

THE LUNCH / JACYNTHE CÔTÉ

C U R R I C U L U M V I TA E

BEGINNINGS

• Born in the remote northern Quebec town of Normandin. Her father was a musician and gentleman farmer.

• The only daughter of six children, she grew up competing with her brothers in family hockey and baseball games.

• Her brothers treated her as an equal, a “key factor” that made her comfortable in the mining sector. “I don’t feel lost in a male-dominated environment.”

CAREER

• After graduating with a chemistry degree from Laval University, her first job was a 10-month stint at a semi-conductor company in Granby, Que., where she was night-shift process manager.

• Worked in a variety of managerial posts at Esso Building Products in Montreal for eight years, overseeing the development and production of new construction products.

• Joined Alcan as process analyst at the Vaudreuil, Que., alumina refinery in 1988. Within a year she was tapped as a manager and moved quickly up the management chain, overseeing a variety of smelting and refining operations in Canada and the U.K.

FAMILY LIFE

• She lives in Montreal with her husband Denis Dion and their three children, aged 16, 17 and 19.

• Her husband ended his career as an emergency room nurse after he was seriously injured 14 years ago in a car accident that limited his ability to walk for several years.

• Ms. Côté is a breast cancer survivor.

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THE JUGGLE

• Prides herself on keeping a balanced and healthy life, but she doesn’t seek perfection as a mother or executive. “I have given up a long time ago the goal of being the best mom, the best wife, the best professional … but I do have to be good at it all.”

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JIMMY WALES

The man with all the answers; In the middle of a media blitz marking his creation’s 10-year anniversary, and between bites of scrambled eggs, Wikipedia’s founder

explains why his free encyclopedia is better off in the hands of volunteers

JOANNA SLATER15 January 2011

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New York — It’s a wintry morning in January when I arrive at the Bowery Hotel. Cozy yet impossibly chic, it draws celebrities like flies. Just outside the door, Eddie Izzard, the British comedian, is jumping into a taxi. Inside the lobby, a man standing at the check-in desk looks like the actor who played a key villain in the original Superman movies.

But what is his name? I am still racking my brain as Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, slides into a U-shaped booth at the hotel’s restaurant for breakfast. He pulls out an iPad and starts scrolling through Web pages. Within moments, my intellectual itch is scratched (the name I’m searching for is Terence Stamp).

It’s Wikipedia, naturally, that has provided the answer. Like nearly everyone else in the world with an Internet connection, Mr. Wales, too, uses it to satisfy questions, indulge curiosities, and fill in pesky blanks.

Exactly a decade after it started, Mr. Wales’ idiosyncratic project – a free encyclopedia generated by the collective effort of volunteers – has woven itself into our cultural fabric. Its quirks and inaccuracies still inspire mockery, but it’s hard to dispute its influence. Wikipedia is one of the 10 most visited sites on the Internet and has versions in more than 270 languages. Most striking of all, it remains a not-for-profit enterprise.

Along the way, Mr. Wales has become his own type of celebrity. He is the public face for Wikipedia’s legions of faceless volunteers and a cheerleader for its efforts worldwide. When we meet, he is embarking on a media blitz to mark the site’s 10th birthday. Later that evening, he appears on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

At 44, Mr. Wales is a unique figure in the technology world. While he hobnobs with Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, he makes no money from his creation. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine either of those moguls talking excitedly – as Mr. Wales does – about the Tamil, Ukrainian, and Swahili versions of their inventions.

I ask whether he has any regrets about keeping Wikipedia, which some have estimated could be worth more than $3-billion, a non-profit endeavour. “No, no,” he says. “For me, it’s something really special in our culture. I think 500 years from now people will look back and they’ll say: ‘That Wikipedia was really something interesting.’”

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First things first: food. Mr. Wales, wearing a blue striped shirt and a caramel-coloured jacket, is starving. His order of scrambled eggs with chicken-apple sausage arrives and he begins forking it into his mouth.

Interviewing Mr. Wales has a hall-of-mirrors quality. I’ve looked at his Wikipedia entry, which includes details like his breakup with a girlfriend and the controversy over whether he is the founder or co-founder of the site (philosopher Larry Sanger, a key early hire, also claims the title; Mr. Wales has called the debate “silly”). At the same time, Mr. Wales knows that anything he says to a journalist could find its way, relatively quickly, into the entry. “You get this odd view of yourself,” he says.

The son of a teacher and a grocery store manager, Mr. Wales grew up in Huntsville, Ala. By his late 20s, he was working toward a doctorate in finance when he decided he was bored with academia and set out for Chicago to trade options and futures.

Soon Mr. Wales, a long-time programmer, was lured by the opportunities on the Internet (in truth, he doesn’t sound like a born trader; asked whether that job was stressful, he responds, “Not really – it’s somebody else’s money.”). He and two partners started Bomis, a Web portal focused on laddish content – cars, sports and women. It foundered in the dot-com bust, but had a surprising legacy: It provided the initial funding for what would become Wikipedia.

Today, Mr. Wales is a board member, one of 10, at the Wikimedia Foundation, which oversees Wikipedia (Sue Gardner, formerly of the CBC, is the foundation’s executive director). But Mr. Wales also acts as a sort of godfather for the site, someone from whom volunteers seek advice on disputes and grievances.

He’s the main point of contact for some of the most sensitive issues Wikipedia faces. One example: In late 2008, New York Times reporter David Rohde was kidnapped by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Concerned that any publicity would further endanger him, the newspaper sought co-operation from other media organizations to keep the kidnapping quiet.

It did, however, pop up briefly on Wikipedia, so the New York Times called Mr. Wales. Aware that any entry he edits is subject to intense scrutiny, he passed the matter on to one of the site’s administrators. Since there was no reliable source for the information about the

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kidnapping, the administrator deleted it and temporarily locked the entry, preventing changes.

Amazingly, the Times managed to keep the kidnapping out of the public eye for another seven months before Mr. Rohde escaped his captors. Mr. Wales recently met with Mr. Rohde and his wife, who hugged him, almost in tears. “I knew we did the right thing,” he says. “I was really proud of the way we handled it.”

Mitchell Kapor, a technology pioneer and a founder of Lotus Development Corp., has known Mr. Wales since 2003 and acted as an informal mentor. He credits Mr. Wales with the skill of exercising leadership through inspiration and persuasion, rather than direct authority.

“A less farsighted person would be tempted to retreat from volunteer control, decentralized [power], and anonymity,” Mr. Kapor says. “He does not retreat and he is very good at articulating why.”

For someone of strong philosophical convictions, Mr. Wales has a genial, live-and-let-live attitude. He doesn’t hesitate to describe people as “super sweet” (Jimmy Carter, for instance, and even Mark Zuckerberg, both of whom he knows personally).

“My life is amazing,” he says. He roams the world, splitting his time between London and the Tampa Bay area of Florida, where his 10-year old daughter lives. He is passionate about expanding Wikipedia’s reach in the developing world. His for-profit business, called Wikia – a place for enthusiasts to build caches of knowledge and exchange notes on their favourite topics – is growing quickly. “So, you know, maybe I’ll make some money there,” he says.

By now, our plates are empty and Mr. Wales is dodging phone calls. He excuses himself with a jaunty goodbye, off to the next conversation.

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* * * * * * * * * *

C U R R I C U L U M V I TA E

BEGINNINGS

• Born 1966 in Huntsville, Ala.• Educated at Auburn University and received a master’s degree

from the University of Alabama• Pursued doctoral work in finance at Indiana University but did

not complete his dissertation

CAREER

• Moved to Chicago in 1994 and joined Chicago Options Associates, where he traded futures and options

• In late 1990s, founded several startups, including “guy-oriented search engine” Bomis

• Launched Wikipedia on Jan. 15, 2001, with Larry Sanger

PERSONAL

• Divorced, one daughter

READS

• Favourite book is The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand• Currently reading The Genius in All of Us by David Shenk

FUTURE PLANS

• Travel to promote Wikipedia’s growth in developing countries• Help diversify the site’s community of editors, for instance, to

include more women• Expand Wikia Inc., a for-profit business he founded in 2004

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OLEG DERIPASKA

At home with Oleg; While The Globe’s Eric Reguly washes down his pork chop and fried potatoes

with Scotch, one of Russia’s richest and most powerful magnates picks away at cake while sipping his tea. ‘Call me Oleg,’ says the man who sits atop a sprawling empire that

straddles just about every sector

ERIC REGULY12 February 2011

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Moscow — Oleg Deripaska, the Russian billionaire who is said to be Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s favourite industrialist, has gone unshaven for at least three days. He is in grey training pants, a white T-shirt and a dark blue fleece. His nine-year-old son Peter and the family’s Labrador retriever, Leo, scurry about. It is 10:30 at night and Mr. Deripaska is relaxed — that is, as relaxed as anyone with 240,000 employees, an empire that nearly collapsed two years ago and a frisky dog trying to drag the table cloth (and all the plates with it) onto the floor can be.

We are in the Deripaska family chalet about 20 kilometres outside of Moscow. A small ski hill next to the chalet is floodlit, exposing a few of the security guards who are an eternal presence in his life. Mr. Deripaska flops onto one of the cushy, low-slung chairs, orders tea from the kitchen staff and invites me to call him Oleg.

The bookshelves are laden with classic Russian novels and books on modern Japanese design – Mr. Deripaska loves Tokyo. Peter, who speaks English with a British accent (he and his sister share a British nanny) is showing us how Leo can dance on his hind legs. His father laughs. “Very intelligent dogs, Labradors,” he says.

The modern chalet is big but not ostentatious. “I am not in Aspen, I live in Moscow,” he says in an English that has improved markedly since I last interviewed him in his Moscow office three years ago.

Since then, the oligarch has fought for his survival. The financial crisis shredded the value of his holdings, a collection of 100 companies built over just a dozen years as he rose from metals broker to industrial baron. And he might well have lost it all in 2008 if not for his close ties to the Kremlin.

Exactly how Mr. Deripaska managed to save Rusal – the aluminum company that was the main source of his wealth – and other investments, is still a matter of debate. Certainly he won a standoff with foreign creditors, but some think he would be dead and buried without a little help from his political friends, who evidently had no desire to see his investments seized by non-Russians. When his fortunes turned desperate in the bleakest months of the crisis, Mr. Deripaska’s long-standing record of plowing his fortunes back into Russia, no doubt helped his cause; some of his fellow oligarchs chose instead to acquire overseas trophy assets like American and British sports teams.

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Because he knows I am Canadian, he tells me how Peter has developed a passion for Canadian maple syrup. I wonder where he gets the stuff and before I can ask, he explains that his son was given a load of syrup by Barrick Gold chairman Peter Munk. The booty formed part of the cargo of Mr. Munk’s yacht and was transferred to the Deripaskas’ in Montenegro, where the two billionaires are developing a superyacht marina. As it turns out, maple syrup is not the only bit of Canadiana on Mr. Deripaska’s mind. Two others are the Vancouver Olympics and Hydro-Québec.

Mr. Deripaska visited Vancouver (and attended the Russia-Canada hockey playoff) to get ideas for his developments at Sochi, the southern Russian town that will host the 2014 winter Olympics. Hydro-Québec might hold the key to his global hydroelectric ambitions. He told me he leaves Sunday for Montreal to discuss a possible partnership. “They have knowledge and expertise,” he says. “We’re looking for a partner to build new hydro plants.”

Winning the aluminum crown

The dining table is covered with cakes and fresh fruit that are rare treats in frozen Russia: Pomegranates, strawberries, blueberries, grapes, oranges and small, sweet apples that were grown on Mr. Deripaska’s farm. I wolf down a pork chop and fried potatoes and sip on Scotch. He sticks with tea, ignores the fruit and half-heartedly tackles a piece of cake.

Mr. Deripaska is 43, tall, slim and in good shape, thanks, apparently, to a careful diet and sporadic, though vigorous, bouts of cross-country skiing. With his stubble beard and close-cropped hair, he looks more like one of his security guards than the owner of Russia’s most diversified industrial group, Basic Element, whose holdings range from uranium mines to Gaz, the car and truck maker that recently struck a deal with General Motors to produce small Chevrolets in Russia.

There are more than 100 other companies in the empire, almost all of them private, in a bewildering array of industries. They include hotels, airports, defence and banks.

Mr. Deripaska has a business that makes log cabins and another that publishes the Russian edition of Hello! magazine. Last year, the group’s total revenues (unaudited) were $24.2-billion (U.S.).

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In spite of his wealth – Forbes magazine last put it at about $11-billion, down from a pre-crisis peak of $28-billion – Mr. Deripaska is not conspicuously flashy like many of the oligarchs.

Roman Abramovich collects superyachts like so many bathtub toys, owns Britain’s Chelsea football club and just forked out £50-billion ($79-billion) for Spanish striker Fernando Torres.

Suleiman Kerimov has a penchant for Ferraris, one of which he crashed in 2006, nearly burning him alive. Mikhail Prokhorov, the gold baron who loves to play basketball, owns the New Jersey Nets.

That is not to say that Mr. Deripaska deprives himself.

His 73-metre, six-deck yacht, the Queen K, is a regular visitor to the Mediterranean’s most glamorous resorts. He shuns hotels wherever he can. Instead, he buys properties in the places he frequents: Tokyo, London, Montenegro, among others. Mr. Deripaska is shy and strives to avoid publicity, to the point he doesn’t publicize his numerous charities, which have doled out $250-million (U.S.) over the last decade, largely to education projects.

He is lucky he can play his own version of global Monopoly, for he came close to losing it all in the 2008 financial crisis.

Mr. Deripaska was born in Krasnodar, in Cossack country’s tea-growing region in the far south of Russia. He was drafted into the Soviet army, became an accomplished physics and math student and went on to study nuclear physics at Moscow State University. Graduating just as the old Soviet Union was giving away to the new, raw capitalist Russia, he like many of his contemporaries went into business instead of state research.

He became a metals broker and emerged as the big winner of the so-called aluminum wars of the 1990s. The details are murky. What is known is that there were nasty bouts of violence. Mr. Deripaska often slept in his Siberian smelters so he could monitor their production during those turbulent years. Today Rusal is the biggest single source of his wealth. The company, floated on the Hong Kong exchange last year, is 47.4-per-cent owned by Mr. Deripaska, has a market value of about $25-billion and owns 25 per cent of Norilsk, the world’s biggest nickel maker.

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In 2007 he was on top of the world, only to learn that leverage cuts both ways. The crisis crippled his real estate, manufacturing and auto businesses. Gaz alone blew out 50,000 workers (though has since rehired 15,000). A margin call deprived him of his $1.5-billion stake in

Canadian auto parts company Magna International and he had to unload his stake in Strabag, the Austrian construction giant that is building infrastructure for the Sochi Olympics (he has since bought back into Strabag).

When aluminum prices collapsed in the autumn of 2008, Rusal breached its covenants and seemed certain to become a ward of the international cadre of banks that had stuffed Rusal with $7.4-billion in loans.

Mr. Deripaska used a combination of tough negotiations and clever gamesmanship to keep control of Rusal. He bet correctly that the banks would have no interest in owning and managing a massively complicated company, whose supply chain extends from alumina operations in Jamaica to Siberian hydropower plants. “The deal was very simple,” he says. “We never tried to screw the banks. I said ‘You keep the debt and I will manage the company and deliver for you.’”

Another interpretation is that he owes Rusal’s salvation to his impeccable government connections (he is married to the daughter of the chief-of-staff to former president Boris Yeltsin). Kremlin-controlled VEB bank gave Rusal a $4.5-billion bailout loan at the height of the financial crisis, allowing the company to restructure its foreign debt. The Kremlin would not have liked the alternative. The foreign banks might have seized Rusal, only to sell it to a rival such as Aloca or Rio Tinto. Big resources like aluminum are considered national strategic assets in Russia.

The crisis appeared to damage Mr. Deripaska’s relationship with Mr. Putin, however. In a televised broadcast in mid-2009 in a hard-hit Russian industrial town called Pikalyovo, Mr. Putin compared industrial barons who left workers’ wages unpaid to cockroaches. He then forced Mr. Deripaska to sign a document safeguarding the future of a local factory, snapping “And give me back my pen,” the moment the crestfallen oligarch did so.

The event played well in recession-racked Russia, but may have been staged political theatre. There no longer appears to be any friction

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between the two men. “I believe Russia recognizes Oleg’s major role in building a renewed economic base in a broad range of domestic businesses and rejuvenating ailing companies and infrastructure,” says Tye Burt, the Kinross Gold chief executive officer in Toronto who knows Mr. Deripaska.

Back from the brink

After a tumultuous two years, Basic Element seems more or less stable in its somewhat diminished form. After a disastrous start on the stock market, Rusal shares are up about 50 per cent in the last six months. Norilsk is worth about $50-billion, putting the value of Rusal’s stake at more than $12-billion. Gaz, whose production lines came to a virtual halt during the crisis, is pumping out cars again. “Gaz is producing five times more vehicles than we used to produce during the Soviet Union [era],” Mr. Deripaska says..

The one looming threat, other than double-dip recession, is a nasty legal dispute with Michael Cherney, also known as Mikhail Chernoy, the Uzbekistan-born Israeli businessman and veteran of the aluminum wars who claims Mr. Deripaska cheated him out of a 20-per-cent stake in Rusal.

Mr. Deripaska denies he owes Mr. Cherney anything. He claims he was forced to work with Mr. Cherney and that Mr. Cherney extorted money from him. In 2008, a British judge ruled that Mr. Cherney’s claims could be heard in British court.

The case is to begin in April, 2012. In the meantime, Interpol is seeking the arrest of Mr. Cherney for alleged money laundering in Spain.

Mr. Deripaska is back in expansion mode and the one area that seems to excite him most, other than preparing Basic Element’s Sochi airport and the Olympic village for the 2014 games, is hydroelectric power. EuroSibEnergo, Russia’s biggest privately-owned hydro company, which is headed for the Hong Kong stock market next month, is emerging as Basic Element’s potential growth champion. “I believe that this company will double its capacity in next 20 to 25 years,” he says.

He believes that only hydro and nuclear power can save the planet from a carbon-dioxide fuelled inferno. “Hydro causes a lot less environmental damage that coal,” he says. “Look at China; 3.2 billion

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tonnes of coal burned a year. Massive emissions into the atmosphere, massive ash on the ground.”

But what about solar and wind power, and biofuels? Wind and solar are power, he says, will never been more than niche power sources while turning food like corn into fuel like ethanol is “definitely a mistake” because it puts upward pressure on food prices.

Which leaves nuclear and hydro power. The problem with nuclear is the exceedingly long time, sometimes decades, between concept and production. Building hydro plants takes fewer years and, if properly constructed and maintained, can last for centuries. Enter Hydro-Québec. Basic Element and Hydro-Québec have been holding exploratory talks for several months about forming a technology and construction partnership to develop international power projects, possibly in Latin America. Mr. Deripaska is meeting Hydro-Québec’s top executives in Montreal Monday feb 18 to see if a formal partnership can be launched.

China is his other obsession. Mr. Deripaska doesn’t buy the argument that China might be a bubble economy. “They have real demand for everything, for cars, for apartments and kitchen appliances,” he says. “I just can’t see anything that can stop them from growth. They just need it. It’s not like the real estate market in Tokyo. That was artificial.”

Russia in general and Basic Element in particular are poised to feed the Chinese tiger with everything from aluminum and hydro-power grids to uranium and rail cars. The potential is vast, he says, and will shift Basic Element’s focus to the east, overhauling Russia’s economy in the same way that Australia is thriving from its role as China’s offshore storehouse of resources wealth. “China’s reflection in Australian GDP is 20 per cent,” he says. “In Russia, it’s still less than 2 per cent.”

Rusal, he says, is in a particularly good position to supply China because soaring Chinese energy costs will push down domestic aluminum production (making aluminum requires vast amounts of electricity). Imports will fill the gap. “Over time, I am very optimistic that China will import aluminum and steel,” he says. “This will create opportunity for Rusal. Rusal will build another 1.5 million tonnes of capacity and become a six-million-tonne a year company.”

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The stay-at-home oligarch

Late in the evening, when the lights on the ski hill have been turned off and only the faint outline of trees against the snow is visible, I try to steer the conversation away from business and markets and statistics.

I ask what motivates him and I get elliptical responses. As far as I can make out, he considers himself a Russian patriot who wants to combine the best of the old Soviet Union - superb science and engineering training, infrastructure development, pride of country - with modern capitalism to drag Russia into a new industrial age.

“We are not investors,” he says. “We run businesses. I am living here, of course and I care. I know we have a unique opportunity for my [country] to be developed.”

The implication is that he doesn’t want to be like the oligarchs who invest in portfolios of companies, as if they were buying mutual funds, or taking their fortunes overseas to load up on trophy assets. He will even criticize the men who made huge profits from the “loans-for-shares” scheme in the 1990s, when the cash-strapped government traded equity in state-owned enterprises, from telecommunications to energy, for loans. A small group of Russians got exceedingly rich by taking control of valuable - though epically mismanaged - companies on the cheap (Mr. Deripaska was not involved in the loans-for-shares).

The problem is that some of the industrialists, he says, “did not fulfill their promises” to reinvest back into Russia. Mr. Deripaska, the stay-at-home industrialist (minus the occasional yacht tour) considers Russia an obligatory market, as well as one that can earn him billions as he fixes up the decrepit economy.

At one in the morning, Mr. Deripaska has work to do and escorts me to the door. He says goodbye. I expect him to reach for his BlackBerry or phone. Instead Leo comes thundering into the foyer and I watch through the window as the unshaven billionaire laughs as he plays with his pet.

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C U R R I C U L U M V I TA E

BEGINNINGS

• Born Jan. 2, 1968, in Dzerzhinsk, and grew up in Krasnodar in southern Russia

• Raised by grandparents after his widowed mother had to move away to find a job

• Told the Financial Times his mother, an engineer, helped him get his first job at 12, doing “electrical work” at her factory

• Once drafted into Soviet army, spent two years in the Strategic Missile Forces

• Graduated from Moscow State University with a degree in physics in 1993. In 1996, a master’s degree from Plekhanov Academy of Economics.

CAREER HIGHLIGHTS

• Became metals trader and in 1994 purchased a 20-per-cent stake in Sayanagorsk Aluminium Smelter in Siberia; later the smelter’s director general

• Established Sibirsky Aluminum Group and served as its president in 1997.

• Company renamed Basic Element in 2001; served as chairman of supervisory board until 2009, when he became chief executive officer.

• Served as director general of Russian Aluminium (Rusal) 2000 to 2003

• Rusal, the Sual Group and alumina assets of Glencore International AG merged and became United Company Rusal in 2007; appointed CEO in 2009.

• Named Russia’s richest citizen in 2008 by Forbes magazine.

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BUSINESS COMMITMENTS

• Basic Element is a Russian investment company with holdings in energy, manufacturing, financial services, construction and aviation, among others.

• Its more than 100 companies include such notable names as Rusal, Gaz Group, Transstroy and Ingosstrakh.

FAMILY LIFE

• Married Polina Yumashev in 2001; they have two children.• Wife is daughter of a chief of staff to former Russian president

Boris Yeltsin.• Is also Yeltsin’s grandson by marriage as his father-in-law is to

married Mr. Yeltsin’s daughter.

POLITICAL CONNECTIONS

• Won the Order of Friendship from the Russian Federation in 1999.

• Former Russian president Vladimir Putin appointed him to represent the Russian Federation in the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Business Advisory Council in 2004

RECENT SETBACKS

• Global financial crisis hurt his business interests; forced to give up his $1.5-billion (U.S.) stake in auto parts maker Magna International after a margin call by a group of banks.

• Also gave up a $500-million stake in German construction company Hochtief and another stake in Austrian construction company Strabag. (Has since repurchased Strabag interest.)

• Crisis also put a dent in his personal fortune. His net worth fell to $11-billion from $28-billion, according to Forbes.

Rita Trichur

Monday, February 14, 2011

The Chelsea football club has paid Fernando Torres 50-million pounds. Incorrect information appeared on Saturday.

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TYE BURT

Running bulls, racing boats, and a good read; Over a light lunch and glass of Chablis at an iconic

Left Bank café, Kinross CEO Tye Burt tells Eric Reguly what he loves doing best

ERIC REGULY26 February 2011

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Paris — Ernest Hemingway would not approve.

In the 1920s, Café de Flore and Café des Deux Magots on Paris’s Left Bank were alive with great American writers: Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Thornton Wilder. Hemingway’s first books were published in Paris and it is said he wrote part of A Moveable Feast in Café de Flore, “bent over his notebook, writing slowly as if he weighed every word,” according to Sara Mayfield, author of Exiles in Paradise.

Some 90 years later, on a cold, grey Friday in January, Flore is full of tourists, a few smartly dressed Parisians taking a break from St.-Germain-des-Prés shopping excursions, and one wealthy Canadian businessman – Tye Winston Burt, CEO of Toronto’s Kinross Gold, the world’s fifth-largest gold company, with a market value of almost $19-billion.

We sit upstairs, where it is less frenetic and where Mr. Burt can speak about his three passions – Hemingway, sailing, gold – without having to raise his voice. With his close-cropped hair, trim physique and crisp grey suit, Mr. Burt, 53, could be a retired colonel. But today it is his love of Hemingway that has brought us to Flore.

“I have a bit of history here,” he says, while ordering typical Flore fare – Welsh rarebit, a green salad and a single glass of house Chablis. “In 2000, I convinced a gang of friends to do a Hemingway pilgrimage. We toured all the Hemingway haunts that we could find … Then we went to Pamplona and ran with the bulls. The Sun Also Rises was our guidebook.”

He did a similar trip with his son Andrew, then 17, two years ago: “We did the bull run together. I was coaching him on what to do and Andrew said ‘I don’t have to run faster than all those guys, I just gotta run faster than you.’”

Mr. Burt’s other literary loves include Robbie Burns, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, John Irving and George MacDonald Fraser. But a few writers from the non-fiction world have also influenced him heavily, notably Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It.

The book explains why many African and some Asian countries, in spite of their vast commodities wealth and endless foreign-aid injections, can’t break out of grinding poverty. Why does Mr. Burt care? Because Kinross’s bet-the-ranch, $7.7-billion (U.S.) purchase last year

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of Vancouver’s Red Back Mining made it the biggest foreign investor in Mauritania, and is about to make it one of the Western Saharan country’s biggest employers. Kinross bought Red Back largely for the potentially mammoth Tasiast gold development, whose construction phase will employ about 3,500 workers when it starts next year and whose mining phase will directly employ 2,500.

Kinross’s investors may not like what he has in mind, which is to spread Tasiast’s wealth beyond just the local elite and Kinross’s non-African shareholders, minimize the environmental footprint and leave behind something more useful than a gigantic hole in the ground. “I want to make Mauritania an illustration of what responsible development of natural resources can do,” he says.

Kinross started the process with a bang by announcing a partnership with Montreal’s École Polytechnique, the Mauritanian government and the World Bank to launch a mining school in Nouakchott, the capital. Kinross is donating $10-million to the school, which will train geologists, engineers and technicians.

When Tasiast coughs up its last ounce in about 20 years, Kinross intends to leave behind an educated work force, roads, power generation and clean water systems that can be redeployed for new industries.

Altruism does not, of course, fully explain the effort. Mr. Burt thinks corporate responsibility is an essential part of the value-creation process. Mining companies live and die on mining permits and shabby behaviour can delay or eliminate them. “There are plenty of examples where protesters have closed the gates and governments have shut down mines,” he says.

Mr. Burt comes by his green inclinations honestly. Raised on a farm near Brooklin, Ont., he is the son of a botany graduate. “My life was a biology lesson,” he says. “Every time we were out in a stream fishing or on a lake sailing, there was always a discussion of the world around us that translated into a passion for the outdoors, and a view that we have to tread lightly in the world we live in.”

The farm boy, however, couldn’t resist the distinctly unnatural world of corporate finance and mergers and acquisitions. After graduating from Osgoode Hall Law School, he joined Burns Fry (now part of BMO Nesbitt Burns). A decade later, in 1997, he landed at Deutsche Bank as managing director of the global metals and mining group. Next came

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Barrick Gold, where he was head of corporate development. In 2005, he lunged at the opportunity to run his own show and took over a messy company with regulatory problems – Kinross – that had been cobbled together through a string of acquisitions.

An investment banker at heart, Mr. Burt embarked on another round of acquisitions that would drive the company into the high-growth, though risky, gold hot spots in Russia and Latin America. In 2007, he bought Bema Gold for $3.1-billion; a year later Aurelian Resources was snapped up for $1.2-billion. Along the way, Kinross became Canada’s biggest corporate player in Russia, where its capital spending has reached $2.7-billion.

The big move came in 2010. Many investors were skeptical of the Red Back purchase. They thought the price tag was way too rich given the scant information about Tasiast’s gold reserves.

Kinross nonetheless got its prize and Mr. Burt has not retreated from the “just trust me” message as the company gathers more information about Tasiast’s potential. At last count, the mine had “measured and indicated” resources of 9.3 million ounces.

The rumour is that the reserve number could easily land in the 20- to 40-million-ounce range. Mr. Burt won’t comment, except for “Some estimates have been conservative. Tasiast is one of the great ore bodies in the world.”

While shareholder anxiety builds about Tasiast’s true size – the shares have underperformed in the past year – Mr. Burt is deepening both his personal and corporate responsibility pledges. His family foundation recently donated $1-million (Canadian) to his alma mater, Ontario’s University of Guelph, and Kinross gave $1-million to fund a Guelph chair in environmental governance.

At the end of our lunch, the conversation turns to sailing. Mr. Burt owns a remarkable bit of Canadian seafaring history. At Expo 67 in Montreal, the hit of the Maritimes Pavilion was the on-site construction of a 50-foot mahogany schooner called Atlantica. As a young boy, Mr. Burt was there to see it. Thirty-three years later, while killing some time in Halifax, “I spotted a little sign by the waterfront that said ‘Schooner for sale.’ It was Atlantica, in ill repair. I bought it on the spot, restored it and we’ve been sailing and racing it ever since.”

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Today Atlantica is the queen of Mahone Bay, N.S. Mr. Burt says he has no retirement plans, but I can imagine what he’ll be doing when he gives up the helm at Kinross – reading Hemingway in the cockpit of Atlantica, undoubtedly pleased it is powered by wind, not unsustainable hydrocarbons.

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C U R R I C U L U M V I TA E

BEGINNINGS

• Born in 1957 in Toronto, raised on a farm near Brooklin, Ont.• Educated at University of Guelph (history) and Osgoode Hall

Law School.

HOME LIFE

• Lives in Toronto and has a holiday home in Mahone Bay, N.S.• Married to Janet MacDuff, who owns a golf course and restaurant

in Muskoka.• Three children: Andrew, 19, Annie, 17 and Mary, 12

SPORTS AND PASSIONS

• Owner of Atlantica, a 50-foot mahogany racing schooner, moored in Mahone Bay

• Skiing• Fly fishing• Self-described “voracious reader;” favourite authors include

Ernest Hemingway, Robbie Burns and Joseph Conrad

CAREER

• Began Bay Street career in 1986 at Burns Fry in Toronto• Became head of Deutsche Bank’s metals and mining group in

1997• Head of corporate development at Barrick Gold in 2002• Named chief executive officer of Kinross Gold in 2005

OTHER INTERESTS

• Vice-chairman of Guelph University and head of Guelph’s $200-million BetterPlanet Project

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AZIM PREMJI

The bare-bones billionaire; Azim Premji flies economy, his dining tastes are simple and he gives much of his wealth to charity. Talking about plans for

his software giant in Canada, Tavia Grant writes, he even steers clear of corporate jargon

TAVIA GRANT12 March 2011

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True to form, Azim Premji has an austere meal in front of him.

It’s not for lack of choice. His company, Wipro Ltd. ., has laid out an array of decadent pastries, hot drinks and a rainbow platter of fruit for our interview at his new Canadian office. Mr. Premji, India’s third-richest man, has selected seven strawberries and a cup of tea.

Mr. Premji is not like other billionaires. He built his father’s vegetable oil company into a global software empire with operations in dozens of countries, yet he still flies economy class. He walks to work. He does not own a yacht. And in December, he was responsible for the largest lump-sum donation in his country’s history, pledging $2-billion (U.S.) to support rural schools in India.

That generosity is one of the reasons Western media have dubbed him India’s Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder who shares a technological bent and who, like Mr. Premji, dropped out of school. But Mr. Premji is different. For one, he returned to finish his degree in electrical engineering at Stanford University three decades later, a feat he’s quite proud of. For another, his vibe is more professorial than tech nerd.

Mr. Premji has long focused his attention on the developing world, seeing huge potential in major growth markets such as India, China and the Middle East. On this day, dressed in a dapper grey suit and burgundy tie, he is sitting in an office in an industrial area of Mississauga, talking about why Canada now plays such a key role in his company’s growth plans.

Sales here more than doubled in the past year, even before the company ramped up plans and decided to set up the Mississauga headquarters.

Wipro aims to double revenue again in the next year. “It’s a reasonably large market. It’s English-speaking. We think it is a country which is economically very stable, growing, and it produces oil, which helps today in terms of having solid growth. And we have underinvested in it,” he says. “We’re taking it seriously now.”

Wipro now has 2,100 workers supporting its Canadian operations in business services, of which 300 are in Canada. It will add at least 100 more jobs in the country this year with its eco-energy division, which aims to manage energy reductions and cut companies’ carbon footprints. It

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will also branch out into servicing financial, retail and telecom firms in areas such as billings.

Mr. Premji is a journalist’s dream interview: his answers are succinct. He does not stray alarmingly off-topic. He remembers meeting you the year before. He doesn’t pepper his language with jargon.

His business background began with a lurch. At age 21, while studying at Stanford, he got a phone call informing him that his 51-year-old father had died of a heart attack. Azim would have to take over the family’s business – then called Western India Vegetable Products – with annual sales of about $2-million.

At his first shareholders’ meeting, he remembers someone telling him to sell his shares to an older colleague because he couldn’t run such a complex company. Instead, he bought business textbooks and studied them at night. He turned the cooking fat firm into a consumer products company that produced laundry soap and light bulbs. He diversified into information technology – printers and personal computers – and then into global outsourcing.

Today, Bangalore-based Wipro is India’s third-largest information technology exporter. It operates in 55 countries with more than 108,000 employees and sales of about $6-billion. Its businesses range from software and green energy services to consulting and outsourcing. Mr. Premji has a net worth of $16.8-billion, Forbes said this week.

The growth hasn’t come without setbacks. “Many things have failed,” he says. In the mid-1990s, he branched into financial services. “We didn’t understand the depth or the intricacy of the business. And we finally backed off. And we paid an expensive price for that.” What did he learn? “You cannot get into business for the fashion of it,” he says. You need a commitment which is long term and a commitment to leadership, because that’s the only way you build excellence.”

In a country plagued with corruption problems, he has made a public point of never paying bribes. “You can do clean business in India,” he says. “We have found we get better employees because of it, with more pride and more character. We get better partners, because they trust us. And we get more trusting customers because of it.”

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Global challenges remain. Inflation is a broad concern – while he doesn’t see hyper-inflation, he is worried about rising prices in emerging markets.

“Messy consequences” from unrest in the Middle East is another worry. Everyone aspires to democracy, to a degree of control over their lives, he says. But in the process, there will be “uncertainty and major stumbling.

“And major frustrations expressed by people over what they’ve inherited.”

Economic clout is tilting towards emerging markets and away from advanced economies, he said in a recent speech at the Davos World

Economic Forum. In the next decade, he expects emerging countries will have a $20-trillion economy – much larger than the $15-trillion U.S. economy. That means multinational companies will have to develop affordable products to suit local needs, he believes.

Much of his own attention is shifting. On Dec. 1, Mr. Premji said he plans to transfer $1.95-billion worth of shares to a trust that will fund social initiatives, particularly elementary education in rural India. He now spends 10 per cent of his time on the foundation, and he expects that will grow to a quarter of his time in the next few years.

Mr. Premji won’t say whether he plans to give away all his money, à la Warren Buffett. But he has said the trust is expected to expand “significantly” in the coming years. He sees this as the single best way of improving his country.

Much of Mr. Premji’s efforts are focused on girls – keep them in school, give them a basic education, ensure teachers show up for work, empower female leaders at the village level and you will see better health outcomes and smaller families. “How can you contribute towards building the Indian society and the Indian nation? No better way than to upgrade the quality of young people in school, particularly the schools which are run by the state government in the villages.”

Then, there is the matter of Mr. Premji’s frugality. He has made some concessions in recent years – he now flies business class on long-haul flights, and economy domestically. He used to drive a Ford Escort, then a Toyota Corolla. These days it’s a Volkswagen Skoda Laura. He is still

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arrives at the office at 6 a.m., works until almost 7 p.m. and toils after dinner and on weekends. He treks in the countryside, alone or with companions, on the weekends to clear his head.

His sister lives in Halifax with her children. Mr. Premji appears to genuinely like Canada – and is impressed with the Indo-Canadian community, which numbers close to a million people and has potential to help strengthen trade ties between the two countries.

“The Indian community in Canada has integrated much better than the Indian community in United States. They’ve become really Canadian at the same time as keeping all their Indian characters and customs and social groups. It’s a very unique blend, I’ve not seen it in this intensity anywhere else. And they’re doing well.”

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C U R R I C U L U M V I TA E

BEGINNINGS

• Born 1945 in Mumbai• Educated at Stanford University, where he began bachelor of

science degree in electrical engineering in his early twenties and completed it 18 years later

CAREER

• Took over father’s business in 1966• Listed amongst the top 30 entrepreneurs in world history

(Business Week, July, 2007)

PERSONAL

• Married, two sons, two grandchildren

READS

• Not as much as he would like. Among his favourites, The World is Flat and other books by Thomas Friedman, along with anything by Jack Welch.

• Typically reads The Economist, Bloomberg Business Week magazine, Harvard Business Review

HOBBIES

• Trekking in the hills on weekends, alone or with other friends and family members

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MAUREEN SABIA

She means business; The Canadian Tire chairman (never chairwoman) eschews sweets, carbs and anything that

distracts her from the working life

MARINA STRAUSS20 August 2011

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Maureen Sabia is on a diet of protein and strict self-discipline.

The first of these, an eating regimen that consists mainly of meat and fish, has allowed her to shed 10 pounds in six weeks. The second – the self-discipline – is a lifelong habit. Ms. Sabia preaches and practises a life of extreme structure, self-restraint and hard work, propelling her to the head of the boardroom table at Canadian Tire, one of the country’s most iconic retail chains. In the process, she has become one of just a handful of women to hold such a position at a major Canadian public company.

Ms. Sabia has no concept of work-life balance. She never got married, though she was engaged once and broke it off. She never wanted children. She doesn’t take holidays.

Her obsession with hard work and getting ahead wasn’t compatible with finding a life partner, but it helped her land jobs at established organizations and seats on prestigious boards. That intensity began early in her career, playing a part in getting her through law school in the 1960s as one of just three women among 300 at the University of Toronto.

But even as she smashes through glass ceilings in an array of male-dominated domains, she stubbornly holds on to contrarian views. Case in point: She refuses to be addressed by the gender-neutral title of “chairperson” or “chair,” insisting instead on being called “chairman.”

“It’s an office of the corporation,” says Ms. Sabia, as she winds down during a catered buffet of baked salmon and salads in a Canadian Tire boardroom. It’s just a few doors away from her more expansive top-floor office, which has a flawless south-facing view of the city.

“If we had a female CEO we wouldn’t call her ‘president-ess.’ I object to ‘chairperson’ and ‘chair.’ I’m not a piece of furniture … I’m a traditionalist.”

Clad in a silk and linen Donna Karan suit, the 70-year-old looks trim and proper as she savours the quinoa and bulgur salad with mixed vegetables. But she’s a study in paradoxes: Ms. Sabia is a modern woman with an all-consuming work life (she sits on a number of government and other advisory bodies), but reverts to an earlier day for important events, slipping on long kid gloves and one of her dozens of hats. She

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sports an elegant double-strand of pearls, but also a pair of pointy-toed Prada stilettos adorned with a splash of a Picasso print.

Influenced by her late mother, Laura Sabia, a high-profile feminist, and her surgeon father, Michael, she comes from a high-achieving, close-knit family that had lofty expectations of her and her three siblings. She swaps advice with brother Michael, who is chief executive officer of the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, the province’s pension fund manager.

In June, Ms. Sabia was named to the Order of Canada for supporting the advancement of women in business and bolstering corporate governance. It runs in the family – her mother got the honour in 1974. Despite being raised in an environment that championed women, the younger Sabia was still exposed to sexist attitudes over the years. Even in applying to Harvard law school, she recalls, an assistant dean of admissions told her he didn’t think he could give her “a place that belonged to a man because I didn’t look like I’d ever have to earn my own living.”

Yet Ms. Sabia opposes quotas for women and says her mother was also “horrified” by such forced equality. She prefers Margaret Thatcher’s brand of can-do feminism. At her board table, only two of the 16 Canadian Tire directors are women – she and her friend and confidante, Martha Billes, who is controlling shareholder of the company and daughter of one of its founding brothers. In an odd twist, Ms. Sabia got her own seat on the board in 1985 after Ms. Billes specifically looked for women in a bid to assert herself in a male corporate bastion.

“We don’t work in percentages here,” Ms. Sabia says, sipping from a glass of tomato gazpacho garnished with basil sprouts. “We work on the right people for the right jobs … Quotas, as far as I’m concerned, are insulting to women. I think feminism got hijacked by the left.”

At the same time, she uses numbers to point out that 30 per cent of Canadian Tire’s top VPs, and 35 per cent of associate VPs, are women. She’s searching for more females for her board and expects to find one soon.

Her board seat has given her a unique vantage point at Canadian Tire over 26 years, longer than any other director – except Ms. Billes – and any other executive. Over that time, the company survived a very public battle for control, the 1994 arrival of U.S. discount titan Wal-Mart

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Stores Inc., power struggles among mighty franchise-like store owners, and the juggling of an ever more complex web of businesses, including a full-fledged bank. Soon, it will start absorbing its about-to-be acquired Forzani Group Ltd., the sporting goods purveyor.

Now the retailer has reached another juncture as it faces what could be its biggest challenge yet: the 2013 launch in Canada of savvy U.S. discounter Target Corp.

“We were counted out when Wal-Mart came to town,” Ms. Sabia says. “They said, ‘Ah, end of Canadian Tire.’ Well, Canadian Tire is still alive and kicking fairly successfully. We will respond to the challenges. Don’t count us out.”

Ms. Sabia’s ties to Ms. Billes hasn’t hurt her staying power at the merchant. They talk on the phone at least two or three times a week, mostly about business, and Ms. Billes leans on Ms. Sabia for advice. “Martha never, never managed the company … That’s part of her strength.”

To strengthen corporate governance on her board, she encourages directors and management to work more closely together, promoting candid discussion. She takes the lead, arriving at the office at 7 a.m., four days a week, in time to catch up with CEO Stephen Wetmore. She usually spends a full day in the office – sometimes longer – calling directors, combing through reports and organizing meetings and working dinners, often catered by Daniel et Daniel, which also caters our lunch. As well, she tends to other matters linked to her non-Canadian Tire duties.

Her biggest challenge was having to persuade fellow directors to accept her as chairman in 2007. “I’m a control freak and they knew that,” she laughs. “That was a challenge I had to overcome and I worked hard to overcome that. I consulted everybody about it. I began to behave in a way that was sensitive to these concerns … I don’t think there’s a week that goes by that I’m not talking to three or four directors about whatever the issue may be.”

Nevertheless, her boardroom skills didn’t help her in 2003 when she resigned as an independent director from the Hollinger Inc. board in the wake of the Conrad Black fiasco. His wife, Barbara Amiel, a former schoolmate of Ms. Sabia, had recommended her as a director. Today, Ms. Sabia waves away mention of the subject. “I have no comments to make on Hollinger or the assorted individuals associated therewith.”

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Still, jostling to keep lines of communication open and arrange meetings and meals fits with her need to keep a firm grip on situations. Even her diet is part of that mentality. “I decided I was going to be more in control.”

Finishing her meal, she turns that control toward her dessert - carefully scooping the raspberries from a tart.

“Discipline!” she later explains.

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I N H E R O W N W O R D S

On the need for change at Canadian Tire:

“I’m an impatient person. I always wanted to move faster than is probably more prudent to move.”

On work:

“I don’t do much else except work because I’m a work freak … I’m not sure what else I’d do with my life if I didn’t work. I don’t have this balanced approach to life … it’s in my upbringing.”

On her siblings and family life:

“We were brought up with a huge sense of responsibility that you had to achieve … If you worked hard enough and you were smart enough, there was no end to what you could achieve.”

On her advice to other women:

“Life is more complicated for women. Discipline is a tool that can help you navigate those complexities.”

On feminism:

“The feminist movement of recent times – not my mother’s brand – told women they could have everything, they could have it all. Nobody can have it all. Life is choices.”

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On men:

“I met lots of men in my life that I would have thought about marrying… I never spent enough time at it and I should have. When you’re younger and trying to get ahead and working on your career, if you’re me – that’s more important. ”

On having children:

“It’s a scary responsibility. It’s not like a new BMW in the driveway. Kids are for life. I had to make choices. I don’t like to do things by half-measure.”

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C U R R I C U L U M V I TA E

BACKGROUND

• Born April 14, 1941, in Montreal.• Her late mother Laura Sabia, a feminist, was appointed to the

Order of Canada in 1974; father Michael was a surgeon; brother Michael is head of Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, the province’s pension fund manager; two sisters.

PERSONAL

• Honours BA in English and history, McGill University. Law degree, University of Toronto

• Favourite pastime is reading Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (“my little bible” that sits on her bedside table for inspiration).

CAREER HIGHLIGHTS

• Began career with the OSC.• Assistant counsel to the Ontario Law Reform Commission and

later director of research and policy and solicitor to the board of OMERS.

• Worked for Canadian Pacific; served as general counsel for Redpath Industries.

• Has run her own consulting practice since 1986, advising on organizational and strategy issues.

• Appointed chairman of Canadian Tire Corp. in March, 2007, after serving as chairman of the audit committee; director of Canadian Tire Bank.

• Has been director of O&Y Properties Corp.; Gulf Canada Resources Ltd.; Hollinger Inc.; Skyjack Inc.; and Laurentian General Insurance Co.

• Appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada in June, 2011, for her role in supporting the advancement of women.

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ROBERT DELUCE

The airline boss who sees only blue skies; The ever-optimistic Porter head savours his soup, fish, and most of all, the fifth birthday of a carrier

that has carved out its own niche

BRENT JANG22 October 2011

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One way or another, Robert Deluce is accustomed to getting his way.

At the stately Fairmont Royal York Hotel’s Epic restaurant, Mr. Deluce doesn’t show any disappointment when he’s told a private room in the back is already booked for lunch. By the time our main course arrives, we will have a corner of the restaurant all to ourselves anyway, after the table of four next to us leaves.

Whether you chalk it up to a streak of luck or shrewd planning, the chief executive officer at Porter Airlines Inc. has confounded skeptics with the regional carrier’s expansion at an urban airport located near Toronto’s downtown core.

On Sunday, Porter will mark the fifth anniversary of its launch at Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport, from where Porter’s shuttle buses take customers for free to the Royal York. Mr. Deluce has guided Porter through some tough times. The airline has become a case study for how a new entrant can carve out a niche in a volatile industry, from overcoming objections levelled by community activists in 2006 to weathering the 2009 recession to fending off the return of Air Canada at the island airport in 2011.

Mr. Deluce, 61, is an unwavering optimist when it comes to Porter’s quest for passengers.

“There’s a certain sense of accomplishment. Hitting our fifth birthday is something to celebrate,” he says, meticulously scooping out and relishing all the shiitake mushrooms from his oversized bowl, before consuming half of the broth.

Porter began with a monopoly on commercial flights at Billy Bishop, cornering the market from the underused airport after a terminal company controlled by Mr. Deluce ousted Air Canada from the site in early 2006. After a bitter court fight, Air Canada finally resumed service this past May, operating the Toronto-Montreal route.

Mr. Deluce isn’t worried. Porter has 172 of the Toronto airport’s 202 takeoff and landing slots daily, or a stranglehold over 85 per cent of the flights. He relishes being a thorn in Air Canada’s side. “We don’t have any baggage from earlier days. We bring a fresh new approach to customer service,” he says, noting that Porter flight attendants wear retro pillbox hats, a throwback to aviation’s glamour era in the 1960s.

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Toronto will remain the primary hub for Porter, but the airline will be looking at expansion possibilities from Ottawa, Montreal and Halifax, too.

Mr. Deluce plans to more than double the number of planes in the airline’s fleet, which currently comprises 24 Bombardier Q400 turboprops. “The Q400 is a made-in-Canada story, built by Bombardier,” he says.

He won’t say exactly how long it will take to expand, but industry observers believe it’s realistic to think Porter will have 50 planes in its fleet within five years. Porter’s Q400s are decked out with leather seats, and there’s free wine and beer on board. The Toronto-based carrier doesn’t compete against Air Canada’s business class, preferring to stick to a single-cabin configuration of “premium economy.”

As well, Porter’s shuttle bus service is complimentary, and so is access to the island airport’s lounge, where customers can help themselves to free espresso, biscotti and WiFi service. Mr. Deluce says that instead of nickel-and-diming his customers, he’s aiming to “offer good value and a refined product,” including a snack box containing a muffin or sandwich on some flights. In-flight coffee is served in a bone china cup and wine or beer in real glassware.

“Most passengers are looking for something that will cut their appetite and allow them to be comfortable until they get somewhere to have their full meal,” he says, before tucking into his grilled halibut over a bed of lentils and heirloom beets. He finishes off the main course, right down to the last lentil.

Mr. Deluce has been a cunning trouble maker, so it’s fitting that Porter’s mascot is a cartoon of a raccoon. Porter had feuded with Toronto City Hall, especially former mayor David Miller, over a plan to build a bridge to the island airport. The bridge fracas has long subsided, and for the Porter CEO, it has been a case of no bridge, no problem.

“We’re not boxed in, in terms of expansion opportunities,” Mr. Deluce insists. He is confident that the fuel-efficient, 70-seat Q400 is the right plane to take the airline to the next level. “Others have tried the Boeing 737, but it’s a bigger aircraft. Even WestJet tried the 737 on some smaller markets and they weren’t able to sustain the routes with that size of airplane,” he says.

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By late 2012 or early 2013, the Toronto island airport expects to gain approval from U.S. authorities for customs officers to pre-clear passengers. Porter needs U.S. customs agents at the island terminal to screen travellers bound for proposed destinations such as Washington’s Reagan National Airport.

Porter’s expansion has been hampered by the lack of a fixed link between the island airport and downtown. A ferry service takes passengers back and forth, but starting in 2013, customers will be able to use a new underground pedestrian tunnel, to be built by the Toronto Port Authority.

At the risk of spoiling his appetite for dessert, I raise the question of whether privately owned Porter is finally making money after years of losses. Porter suspended plans for an initial public offering in 2010, and again this year.

Mr. Deluce smiles and forecasts that the airline’s parent company, Porter Aviation Holdings Inc., will be profitable in 2011 – bolstered by terminal fees charged to Air Canada. The holding company, which lost $44.5-million between its launch and the first quarter of 2010, is the landlord to tenants leasing space at the island terminal. Since Air Canada’s return to Billy Bishop this past May, Mr. Deluce has benefitted from his rival’s presence. “We appreciate the extra fees and charges that Air Canada is paying to us,” he deadpans.

As our lunch wraps up, he gets oddly distracted by a rosemary plant at our table and declares: “Nice smell to it.” In the aviation world, however, Mr. Deluce isn’t so easily thrown off course. Porter launched with 200 workers and now has 1,300 employees. “People are feeling quite good about our anniversary, no matter whether you’ve been part of Porter since right from the beginning or if you’ve joined in the past year,” he says, just before allowing himself a single piece of vanilla biscotti for dessert, to go with his peppermint tea.

He has executed on a business plan that emphasizes Toronto island airport as a more convenient option for the corporate crowd than suburban Pearson International Airport, where Air Canada and WestJet Airlines Ltd. have their main hubs in Central Canada.

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“We’ve had a strong team, right through to our chairman, Don Carty, and we raised $125-million to start, which definitely was a smart move. We didn’t make the classic mistake of trying to launch on a shoestring,” Mr. Deluce says. “We’ve come a long way in five years. On the other hand, we know there’s a lot of things yet to be accomplished and everyone’s up for that challenge. The next five years will be quite interesting.”

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C U R R I C U L U M V I TA E

ROOTS

• Born in Chapleau, Ont., in 1950.• Second-oldest of nine children. Comes from a family with deep

roots in aviation. He and his six brothers obtained their pilot licences as teenagers. Their father, Stanley, ran White River Air Services in Timmins, Ont.

EDUCATION

• High school: Boarded at St. Michael’s College in Toronto.• Pilot: Began flying lessons in 1966, and still pilots his own four-

seat Cessna 185 float plane.• Postsecondary: Bachelor’s degree in science, McGill University

in Montreal.

CAREER

• Immersed in aviation business as the Deluce family added regional carriers such as Austin Airways and Air Ontario to its holdings in the 1970s and 1980s. The family later sold its stakes in the carriers.

• President of Canada 3000, from 1988 to 1995. Sold his interest in the charter airline long before it went under in 2001.

• As CEO, he oversaw the launch of Porter Airlines Inc. on Oct. 23, 2006. Porter, which now has 1,300 workers, flew its five millionth customer this week.

PERSONAL

• His wife, Catherine, founded Chestnut Park Real Estate Ltd. in 1990, a leader in the carriage trade in Toronto and Muskoka.

• Three sons and one daughter.• Two of the Deluces’ sons work at Porter: Michael is chief

commercial officer, while Jason works in IT.

The Globe and Mail Inc.

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MELANIE AITKEN

‘What can I say? I expect a lot’; Melanie Aitken has lit a fire under the once-moribund

Competition Bureau with her campaign for fair play

STEVE LADURANTAYE19 February 2011

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Ottawa — There are a few moments of quiet panic as I consider how to pay for lunch. After two hours with Melanie Aitken, Canada’s Competition Commissioner, I’m particularly aware of the burden that using a premium credit card will place on the owner of this small restaurant in the Byward Market.

The card comes with higher processing charges for the businesses that run it through their machines. But if I lay it down, the restaurant has no choice but to accept it. Those are the rules set by Visa and MasterCard – rules that Ms. Aitken is taking aim at in her latest crusade as the country’s competition watchdog.

I get where she’s coming from and feel a pang of guilt – but my points card is the only plastic in my wallet. As I subtly slip the card into the hands of a passing waiter, it occurs to me that I’m probably not the first person to worry about how he is perceived by Ms. Aitken. In the last year, she has taken advantage of the new U.S.-style powers granted to her office to pursue some of the country’s biggest companies and trade organizations.

Some would say Ms. Aitken takes a rather American approach to the job. While former commissioners have kept a low profile, Ms. Aitken is fighting many of her battles in the public eye, the way many U.S. prosecutors and regulators do. She issues scathing letters that are as much about educating consumers as they are about warning companies to change their behaviour.

Just as industry watchers were ready to write the bureau off as ineffective, Ms. Aitken has forced it into the limelight and to the forefront of Canadian business. She took on the Canadian Real Estate Association over the way it charges consumers who want their houses listed on its Multiple Listing Service and lambasted Rogers Communications Inc. over ads that claimed its network had fewer dropped calls than others.

More recently, she has been locked in an increasingly heated fight with Visa and MasterCard over the way they force merchants to accept points cards that carry fees that can be as high as 3 per cent of a total purchase. Many non-premium cards charge only 1 per cent.

“I must say I get a real charge out of when we do something with a real public impact,” she says. “People quite often don’t get the details of what I’m doing, but they do get that I’m fighting for them.”

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Ms. Aitken, 44, came to the bureau after being seconded to the Justice Department from law firm Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg LLP to work on competition files. It didn’t take long for her to begin her ascent – within two years she was heading the bureau’s merger division, which would be thrust into the spotlight after a federal judge slammed the agency for overstepping its bounds when investigating Labatt’s takeover of Lakeport Brewing in 2008.

An independent review exonerated Ms. Aitken’s department, but big changes were imminent. Parliament handed the bureau sweeping new powers in 2009. Ms. Aitken was now Commissioner, and given an opportunity to transform the bureau from a toothless regulator into a market force capable of challenging takeovers or business practices that threatened competition.

In Ms. Aitken – a litigator who misses the days when she took on large corporations in a courtroom – the bureau found a leader who is willing to become a prominent and outspoken player in Canada’s business community.

“A very significant part of what changed at the bureau when I came in is we got better tools,” she says. “We were given an effective, coherent framework that we didn’t have before.”

The laws may have changed – she can now suspend proposed takeovers by up to a year to investigate them further and levy penalties as large as $25-million for anticompetitive behaviour, such as price fixing – but there’s little doubt that Ms. Aitken’s personality is just as responsible for the agency’s increased visibility as any bit of legislation.

She has an unforgiving – although self-imposed – work schedule that starts after an early morning run along the Rideau Canal and doesn’t end until well after the sun has gone down. While she works in Gatineau, just across the river from Ottawa, she flies to Toronto every weekend to be with her six-year-old son, Jake.

It’s a punishing pace and her personal expectations are set high. She is bilingual after taking French training at 40, but prefers not to speak it because she’s just better at English. She doesn’t see the point of running a marathon because “Really, at the end of the day what have you actually accomplished?”

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She acknowledges her demands and expectations can take a toll on the 400-plus employees who answer to her. Like any government agency, not every bureaucrat is there because of a deep personal commitment to the department’s mandate.

“What can I say? I expect a lot,” she says, picking at a salad she ordered as a safe meal after a bout of food poisoning brought on by dried apricots (she uses the same excuse when I suggest ordering the four-martinis-for-$40 deal).

“I appreciate that different people come to their day with different expectations of what it will hold. But I think Canadians deserve to have their public servants working very effectively and strongly – I expect that.”

Instead of diving into the meal, she tries to explain why she gets so animated when talking about credit card fees. Visa and MasterCard say that forcing merchants to accept all manner of points cards ensures that consumers can use their plastic wherever they want. She sees it differently, suggesting they want to preserve the $5-billion they collect from merchants each year in extra fees.

Consumers may love racking up the free points that lead to flights and gift certificates, but she says small business owners and their customers are the unwitting financiers of the bonus schemes.

“Even if you pay cash, you’re funding my points because the price of the good will have gone up because the merchant needs to recover their costs,” she says. “To me, that’s not transparent; those are hidden fees.”

That said, as someone who flies tens of thousands of kilometres a year, she understands the allure of freebies. When asked if she has a points card in her wallet, she blushes and laughs. Her carefully worded reply is very lawerly indeed.

“I actually do,” she says. “But like a lot of consumers, I had no idea before we did this investigation about the higher costs associated with them … if I’m at a small entrepreneurial store, I’d never use my points card. I just don’t believe that system should be working under anticompetitive restraints. So I’m not going to feed the problem.”

And with that, the prosecution rests its case.

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BACKGROUND

• 44 years old• Born and raised in Toronto• One son, Jake, age 6

EDUCATION

• B.A. Hons. English, University of Toronto 1988• LLB, University of Toronto 1991• The Harold G. Fox Foundation Scholarship, Middle Temple, U.K.,

1993-1994• Adjunct law professor, Osgoode Hall and Queen’s Law Schools

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

• Litigation partner, Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg LLP, Toronto• Competition and litigation partner, Bennett Jones LLP, Toronto• Elected bencher of Law Society of Upper Canada (2007-2009)

GOVERNMENT SERVICE

• Joined the Competition Bureau in 2005• Named senior deputy commissioner of mergers in 2007• Appointed commissioner in 2009 for five-year term

PROFESSIONAL AWARDS

• Arbor Award, University of Toronto, 1999• Top 40 Under 40 in Canada, Lexpert, 2004• The World’s Leading Lawyers, Chambers Global, 2004• Top 100 Women in Competition, Global Competition Review,

2009

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ED SONSHINE

The man who turned the mall inside out; As he digs into a steak salad (he’s watching his figure), RioCan’s CEO tells of the trip to shopping mall riches: Going door-to-door to explain REITs – and becoming the country’s king of

suburban retail development

STEVE LADURANTAYE22 January 2011

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In a city full of fancy restaurants and with the promise of a free lunch dangling before his eyes, all Edward Sonshine wants to do is eat at The Keg.

There’s nothing particularly unique about the midtown restaurant, and that’s the point. It’s the same as all the others in the chain, from the surprisingly dark dining room to the little basket of piping hot bread covered in a black napkin.

It’s an obvious choice for Mr. Sonshine, the chief executive officer of RioCan Real Estate Investment Trust, who has spent the past 15 years developing giant outdoor shopping malls in suburbs across the country. His huge personality may help him stand out amongst Canadian CEOs, but his business is all about doing the same thing over and over.

“This is a good place,” he says as he waits for his transition-lens glasses to lighten up. “I know what to expect, you know?”

Mr. Sonshine started RioCan in 1994, a difficult time to convince anyone that investing in real estate was a good idea. Property values crashed through the early 1990s, and the large power centres that now dominate Canada’s retail landscape had yet to gain a foothold in Canada.

“You’ve got to appreciate that even what we went through here in 2008 and the beginning of 2009 was a walk in the park compared to what the real estate industry went through in the early 1990s,” he says.

Further complicating things for the ambitious lawyer-turned-developer, his company’s decision to set up as a REIT confused many investors who were not yet familiar with the corporate structure that sees the rent generated by properties paid back to the company’s unitholders.

But after watching the nineties crash unfold from his position as executive vice-president at Counsel Management Services, he was convinced that REITs were the best way to recapitalize the struggling real estate industry (he was right – RioCan is now Canada’s largest REIT, with a market cap of $5.9-billion and assets worth $9.5-billion).

With RioCan’s backing, the large outdoor malls anchored by major retailers in huge warehouse-sized outlets that had been taking over the U.S. landscape in the late 1980s soon began appearing in the Canadian suburbs, defying the critics who suggested shoppers would never be

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willing to cross vast parking lots in the middle of winter when so many indoor malls offered warmer options.

“I spent the first three or four years going around knocking on a lot of doors explaining to people what a REIT was,” he says. “I was just looking at making a living. I was worried about bringing home groceries.”

He doesn’t worry about buying food any more. If anything, he worries about eating less. After examining the space between his stomach and the edge of the table, he somberly announces that he’ll be eating salad. It’s not as healthy as it sounds – it’s a sirloin steak salad with blue cheese dressing (served on the side, and then generously applied).

Investors will no doubt be pleased he’s taking care of himself – the company’s board just handed him another five-year management contract, a deal that will see him at the helm of an ambitious U.S. expansion drive that is looking to take advantage of the well-funded company’s ability to access capital.

Rumours of his departure have dogged him for years, and the contract was intended to squelch the speculation. The problem, he says, is a pension plan created about 12 years ago by the board that would only pay out if he served as CEO until he was 60. As 60 approached, many assumed he would quit the day his pension kicked in.

The board redrafted the contract, with an enhanced payout should he stay till 65. He’s 64 now, and the retirement rumours have started again. The board asked him to sign the new five-year deal late last year to stop the speculation.

“The truth is there’s nothing else I’d rather do,” he says, adding the new contract takes him to 68. “Am I going to start a new business? No. I’ve already built one – that’s enough.”

That does raise the question of succession – few Canadian companies are so identified with their CEOs. He heaps praise on the managers he’s hired to steer the company, as he tries to make the case that he’s just a team player.

“I don’t do much, you know,” he says. “I come up with the strategy. I do a lot of capital allocation. Oh, also acquisitions. And finance. We spend a lot of time talking about succession internally, and I work with

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a lot of the people that would be in line and a lot of that depends on how long I stay. Most people think I’ll stay forever, but I won’t.”

There are plenty of reasons to stick around. One is a long-considered U.S. expansion plan. The company spent $600-million in 2010, and plans to do the same this year. And of course, there’s the impending conversion of many Canadian Zeller’s locations into Target Corp. outlets. The deal hadn’t been announced yet when we sat in The Keg, but as one of Zellers’ largest landlords, he was likely one of Target’s first calls when it considered its northern move.

“It’s a good market up here and every American that’s ever come up has done very well,” he says, alluding to Target’s imminent arrival. “In the United States there’s really no new development, not really. There isn’t any. So where are you going to expand?”

Regardless of Target’s expansion plans, Mr. Sonshine sees an abrupt shift coming for the Canadian retail sector as more city dwellers move closer to their downtown jobs.

“We have to come up with urban formats because retailers are desperate to get downtown locations,” he says.

He’s not relying on third-party accounts and market research reports about urban intensification – after 26 years of living in a sprawling York Mills home in Toronto, he’s bought a condo off Bloor Street and he and his wife will soon move in.

“It’s just the two of us rattling around in a pretty big house,” he says. “We don’t need to move but you know, the concept of living a more urban lifestyle is really what’s attractive.”

But the king of suburban retail development hasn’t gone totally green – the condo comes with four parking spaces. That’ll make any weekend trips to the big box stores that much easier.

“Power centres work,” he says. “At our larger centres, people actually will shop at one store, get in their car and drive over to the other side. We see it all the time. What can I say? People love their cars.”

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C U R R I C U L U M V I TA E

BEGINNINGS

• The son of Holocaust survivors, born in a displaced persons camp in Bergen-Belsen, Germany. Family emigrated to Canada two years later (after first trying to move to the U.S.).

• The family went to London, Ont., but found it too small. Moved to Toronto a week later.

CAREER HIGHLIGHTS

• President and chief executive officer of RioCan REIT (since 1995)• Executive vice-president of Counsel Management Services Inc.

(1987-1994)• President and CEO of Counsel Realty Corp. (1987-1993)

FAMILY LIFE

• Three children with wife Fran, whom he married in 1968. Daughter Jodi is a doctor, Daniel works in private equity, and Jonathan works at RioCan.

• Eight grandchildren

BUSINESS COMMITMENTS

• Royal Bank of Canada board (Public policy and corporate governance committee, risk committee)

• Cineplex Inc. board (compensation committee, corporate governance and nominating committee)

• Chesswood Group chairman

RIOCAN OWNERSHIP

• As of mid-November (the most recent reporting period), he owned 325,000 shares worth $7.1-million. His stake in the company peaked in 2005 at nearly 500,000 shares

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MICHAEL MCCAIN

Cold cuts and hard truths; With shareholders restless, the head of Maple Leaf Foods is standing by his conviction that

the best way to make money is to spend it

DEREK DeCLOET3 September 2011

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Toronto — For Michael McCain, it has been the summer of change.

Start with the biggest change of all: He is without his best friend and confidant – his father, Wallace, who died in May. At the funeral service, held in Toronto and simultaneously broadcast in two churches in New Brunswick, Mr. McCain told the assembled mourners that he called his dad nearly every day at 7:30 a.m., “just to hear his voice, just to ask him how he was doing.” So there is a void now in his life and in his morning routine, and also one in the boardroom at Maple Leaf Foods Inc., where the father, as chairman, served as adviser and boss to the son.

His financial circumstances are changing, too. After Wallace’s death, family assets are being shuffled. When that’s done, Michael McCain will have a much-reduced stake in McCain Foods, the private family business out of Florenceville, N.B., that sells frozen pizzas and French fries. Instead, he will have most of his personal wealth tied up in Maple Leaf, a public company where mistakes – including his own – are exposed to broad scrutiny.

All of which is to say there’s probably more pressure on him now than ever. At 52, Mr. McCain has many things: a personal fortune worth hundreds of millions of dollars, a permanent spot in the Canadian establishment and a big job as the head of one of country’s largest food companies. What he doesn’t have is time to waste. There’s something to prove here.

The shareholders are banging at the gates and they want to see a return on their investment – something Maple Leaf hasn’t been able to provide in quite a long time. The company’s stock price is lower than it was a decade ago (when dividends are included, it has produced the tiniest of returns).

Last year, the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan grew tired of waiting and divested its entire 35-per-cent stake, bringing a somewhat bitter end to its long partnership with the McCains. Nearly one-third of those shares wound up in the hands of West Face Capital, an aggressive Toronto hedge fund known to be big on results and short on excuses. A brief skirmish ensued, resulting in Greg Boland, West Face’s founder and chief executive officer, joining Maple Leaf as a director to change the climate in the boardroom.

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What hasn’t changed for Mr. McCain lately is his unwavering belief in his blueprint – a massive overhaul of the business that involves spending more than $1-billion to replace some of Maple Leaf’s medieval factories – and his confidence that by following it, he can make the next 10 years more rewarding the past 10 were.

“Our choice, really, is to fix the business or get out of it. Because you’re not going to run a broken business.” Realizing his choice of words, he tries to correct: “Or a broken supply chain, I should say. Not a broken business.”

Inside a Maple Leaf boardroom, we sit down to a sampling of the company’s products: chicken breast on salad with raspberry vinaigrette; a turkey sandwich with vegetables on Dempster’s rye; Olivieri-brand cannelloni; garlic bread; Schneider’s bacon and wieners. (All of it is prepared by John Placko, a chef who bears the title “director of culinary excellence.”) Mr. McCain, who is probably the only multimillionaire in Canada who would describe a hot dog as “absolutely spectacular,” then begins an examination of the less-than-spectacular shape of Maple Leaf itself.

For instance: There’s a bakery close to downtown Toronto. “That plant was built in 1903. The oven was commissioned four years before I was born, in 1954. The floors are wood, okay? They’ve got wooden floors. I mean, this is an asset that has seen its day.”

He has plenty more like that. After taking control of Maple Leaf with the financial backing of Teachers in the mid-1990s, he and his father made 30 acquisitions. Then they used the favourite crutch of Canadian manufacturers – a weak dollar – to compete with U.S. rivals, papering over the inefficiencies on the factory floor.

When the loonie rose from 62 cents (U.S.) to parity, that game was up. It is the story of Canadian manufacturing, writ small: Too many plants, with too many workers, using technology that is too old, and producing too little, at a cost that is too high. (The proof is in the profit margins, which are thinner than shaved meat. On nearly $5-billion (Canadian) in sales, Maple Leaf earned a grand total of $26-million last year.) Most executives don’t talk down their own companies in this way. But Mr. McCain has something to sell here (his plan), and he isn’t shy about his considerable talent as a communicator to sell it.

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That skill was put to the test in a big way three years ago, when deadly bacteria found its way into Maple Leaf meat, killing more than 20 people. Had the crisis been handled badly, it might well have killed the company itself.

Instead, Mr. McCain was lauded for his response to it: Almost immediately, he went on television, looked straight into the camera, and apologized. For PR professionals, the episode has become a case study in crisis management. It has even been the subject of an academic paper by two professors, who called it an example of “how communication can generate widespread support even after an error with tragic consequences has occurred.”

Watching his TV apology, though, one can detect a hint of fear in his facial expression. Was he worried that the scandal would sink Maple Leaf? “Of course. The day it happened,” he says. He was in his office when he found out about that the first death. “The realization was, you’re looking over the precipice.”

In the end, Mr. McCain and Maple Leaf suffered financial damage but escaped with consumers’ trust intact. Still, he has regrets. He wishes he had known more about food safety before the crisis hit.

“You show me a leader that can’t look and say, ‘Boy, I made mistakes and wish I would have done that differently.’ If you can’t [admit that], you’re a very dubious leader of anything, at any time, in any circumstance.”

And, he hastens to add, the tainted-meat scandal set him back in his efforts to restructure Maple Leaf. He figures he probably lost at least two years of progress.

Even now, faith in that plan is far from universal, not even inside the company. On a recent tour of Maple Leaf plants and offices, Mr. McCain says, he spoke to 4,500 employees, then polled them using electronic voting technology. They were asked, “How confident are you we can get this done?” About 10 per cent answered in the negative; another 20 per cent worry that he is moving too fast. “We viewed it as very strong support,” he says.

Even so, some wonder why he wants to take the long, hard way when there are big multinational food companies that would be eager to pay a premium to buy the company.

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Mr. McCain professes to be open to the idea. But he is far from convinced that selling out is the right thing to do. The legacy of his father is never far from his mind.

“He and I both shared a conviction and a commitment to building things. It’s much better to commit to build than it is to commit to tear down,” Mr. McCain says. “That conviction doesn’t change today. That’s what he would have wanted. That’s what he loved. That’s what I love doing.”

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C U R R I C U L U M V I TA E

FAMILY

• Born Nov. 13, 1958 in Florenceville, N.B., to Wallace and Margaret McCain. His father and three uncles founded French fry giant McCain Foods in 1957.

• Married to Chris McCain. They have five children: Jonathan, Lauren, Hilary, Scott and Hannah.

BEGINNINGS

• Educated at Mount Allison University in Sackville, N.B., and University of Western Ontario.

• According to Family Ties: The Real Story of the McCain Feud, he told his uncle: “Oh, by the way, just so there’s no misunderstanding, my ambition is, some day, to have your job.”

CAREER

• Joined McCain Foods right out of university, in 1979. By 1990, he was running the company’s U.S. division.

• Left McCain Foods in 1995 amid a widely publicized clash between his father and his uncle about which McCain offspring would lead the company.

• He and his father joined forces with Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan to take a controlling interest in Maple Leaf Foods in 1995. Michael McCain became chief operating officer, and was promoted to CEO in 1999.

• Sits on a diverse range of boards.

MANAGEMENT STYLE

• Believes in constant communication. Known to go on cross-country tours of Maple Leaf plants, talking to employees.

• A fan of: The “Six Sigma” management strategy.• Not a fan of: People who claim they’re too busy to take a vacation.

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I N H I S O W N W O R D S

On the death of Wallace McCain

“They say that there’s nothing more intense for a man to go through than the passing of his father. It’s certainly true for me.”

On his decision to take a larger financial position in Maple Leaf and sell down his stake in McCain Foods

“There are many entrepreneurs in life that have all of their eggs in one basket. Does that sometimes lean into risk? Of course it does. But that’s life.”

On the most frustrating thing about his summer vacation in Greece

“I was dying to find some place where I could throw some plates against the wall so [I could say] that I did that. Jesus, I thought that was the ceremonial thing you’re supposed to do in the Greek Islands. Couldn’t find a place to do that.”

On criticism from shareholders

“You know, there’s always critics. There always has been, always will be.”

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JANET HOLDER

The woman tasked with building Enbridge’s high-profile pipeline to B.C.’s coast is

accustomed to tough jobs and long odds

NATHAN VANDERKLIPPESaturday, Nov. 19, 2011

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Calgary — To understand Janet Holder, you could start with the surprising image of her at age 32 - a five-foot-nothing power-lifter tipping the scales at 112 pounds and, by some miracle of muscle and mechanics, dead-lifting nearly three times her weight. Or you could start six years later, when she discovered she had cancer, but managed to do so much work through six months of chemo and the three subsequent surgeries that she was promoted while she was being treated.

But given that the now 54-year-old recently signed on to what is arguably one of the toughest corporate positions in Canada, it’s worth starting last June, at the Calgary headquarters of Enbridge Inc. The conversation around the boardroom table had settled on Northern Gateway, Enbridge’s $6.6-billion proposal to build a twin-pipeline system to the Pacific coast, carrying Canadian crude for export to California and, more importantly, Asia.

The project is among the highest-profile targets for environmental and first nations critics, many of whom see Gateway as a threat to their culture and to the livelihood of Northern B.C., as well as to the salmon and sea life that would be endangered should one of the pipes or tankers spill. And its profile has risen even higher in recent weeks, as problems with TransCanada Corp.’s proposed Keystone XL pipeline bring even greater attention to a West Coast alternative.

For Enbridge, that June meeting came at something of a corporate crossroads. After years of preparation, Gateway was preparing to enter a new stage, with hearings set to start in the new year. Many negotiations remained with first nations, and Enbridge wanted a new face atop the project. Executives discussed who might be a good fit.

They called on Ms. Holder, then the company’s Toronto-based president of gas distribution, for her opinion.

“I said, ‘I agree with everything we’ve been saying. I agree with the people we’re discussing. But we’re missing one probably very key person to do this job,’” she recalls, between bites of grilled chicken salad, as she sits atop a bar-height chair at Sociale, a swish Calgary restaurant.

“They said, ‘Well, who’s that?’ I said, ‘It’s me.’”

She had just volunteered to upend her comfortable Toronto life. And she had not yet broached the subject with her husband, Neal, who restores and races vintage cars, and whose access to a racetrack would

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be severely curtailed in northern B.C. She flew home to talk it over. (He agreed.)

Ms. Holder compares building Gateway, which stands to end Canada’s utter dependence on the U.S. for oil exports, to the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway a half-century ago. “Not a lot of people have the opportunity to say that they were involved with something as significant to Canada as this project,” she says.

Ms. Holder is, by most measures, an odd choice to head up Gateway, as the company’s executive vice-president, western access. She has spent nearly two decades at Enbridge, but most of her recent executive experience is in gas distribution. Delivering blue flames on stoves is far different from getting crude oil to ocean tankers. Add to that some high-profile roles in Toronto’s business community and Ms. Holder does not seem like the kind of person eager to leave the country’s corporate mecca.

In other ways, Ms. Holder’s move makes eminent sense. One of the most pressing ambitions for Canada’s energy sector today is to open up exports to Asia. That effort is being largely led by women: both the past and current leaders of the Kitimat LNG project are women. The head of Royal Dutch Shell PLC, which is leading another major LNG project, as well as the Premier of B.C., who will play an important role, are both women.

Perhaps more importantly for Ms. Holder, however, she holds deep connections to the region. She grew up in Prince George. While she was at university in New Brunswick, she worked at the pulp mills in Northern B.C. during the summer. Her childhood neighbour was a game warden who took kids along when he set bear traps. She is avid enough about rural living that she has already selected the ATVs she plans to buy (Polaris), the car she will use to brave winter (a Subaru), the number of horses she will own (three) and the type of meat she will raise for herself (chickens, in summer).

There is little doubt that Ms. Holder does not fit the mould of a typical oil suit.

One of her all-time favourite Christmas gifts - from her husband, eight years ago - is a chainsaw and a splitting maul. She says she intends to hammer together her own fences on the acreage that the couple, who have no children, own near a lake just outside of Prince George. They

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had already bought that property a half-decade ago, and considered retiring there, before this promotion brought her home.

The questions she now faces: Will her comfort in living in Prince George pay professional dividends? Will having an executive stationed at the mid-point of the Gateway route prove persuasive to the dozens of first nations that have staunchly opposed the project? Will Enbridge’s promise of Little League sponsorship and local benefits change minds among those convinced that the pipeline will leak into their rivers and poison their way of life?

Ms. Holder acknowledges that Enbridge has made missteps. She allows that the company has underestimated the value of communications. In its focus on what she calls the “ ‘big picture’ value equation” to industry and the Canadian people, Enbridge has struggled to enunciate what it means on a local level: “What does it really mean for Kitimat? For Terrace? For Burns Lake?”

By being in Prince George, in a place where people can come to her rather than just have her fly in when she chooses, she hopes to be able to address those concerns.

“It’s not until people believe that you really are going to be part of their community that they’ll even start listening to you,” she says. “You have to show value. You can’t just walk in and say, ‘Here we are. We’re great. Trust us.’”

Ms. Holder left Toronto for Prince George on Friday , but has already met with some municipalities and first nations. She has flown the pipeline’s 1,177-kilometre route, from east of Edmonton to tidewater at Kitimat, B.C.

“We’re making progress. And there’s a lot more ‘yeses’ out there than people would be led to believe,” she says.

But the list of Gateway doubters is formidable. Former Indian Affairs minister Jim Prentice has suggested that first nations legal issues could stymie the development, while this week a senior executive at rival TransCanada Corp. predicted Gateway will face a rougher ride than its Keystone XL pipeline. Other observers have also made unflattering comparisons with the proposed Mackenzie Valley natural gas pipeline - a project that, four decades on, appears to be shelved.

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But Ms. Holder is optimistic. “We’re trying to do this without any opposition, once we get the approval.”

There is little doubt that she is energized by the project - enough so that part of her hopes she will be around to see it not only win regulatory approval, but also deliver its first barrel. A chemical engineer by training, Ms. Holder thinks there is something appealing about overseeing a massive construction project such as Gateway: “The techie in me wants to build it, too.”

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C U R R I C U L U M V I TA E

PERSONAL

• Born in Prince George, B.C.; and ran a sawmill.• Married, no children. Moving to Prince George, B.C.• Chemical engineering degree from the University of New

Brunswick• Master’s business degree from McMaster University, Hamilton.

CAREER

• Started at Union Gas in Chatham, Ont.• Joined Enbridge Inc., held vice-president roles in gas supply

services, marketing, operations, market services and support services.

• Now executive vice-president, western access.

COMMUNITY

• Director, Hydro One Inc., Saint Elizabeth Health Care, Saint Elizabeth Health Care Foundation (Chair), University of New Brunswick Campaign Chair, 2011 United Way Toronto.

MANAGEMENT STYLE

• Quick decision-maker. Counsels subordinates that if she’s off-base, to tell her immediately, because she makes up her mind quickly. A consensus-builder, particularly after a fight with cancer made clear the importance of delegating over micro-managing.

PERSONAL

• Outdoors and animal aficionado. While in Chatham, bred golden retrievers. At one point, while living in Chatham, she had 10 dogs, nine puppies, two horses, a goat and four cats. Today, she has three dogs.

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WALTER ROBB

Munching his granola, quietly: The low-key co-CEO of Whole Foods shares an equal passion for tending his organic

garden and the chain’s Canadian operations

MARINA STRAUSSSaturday, Nov. 5, 2011

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Walter Robb is the rare chief executive officer who’s happy to be flying under the radar.

How he manages to accomplish that is something of a feat: His company, the upscale U.S. grocer Whole Foods Market Inc., generates $10-billion (U.S.) in annual sales, and co-CEO John Mackey has attracted unwanted attention in recent years after a brush with the SEC and a newspaper column that touched off boycotts of its stores.

Perhaps it has something to do with the hippie genes in the 57-year-old organic gardener. On a recent rainy morning at Toronto’s Sutton Place Hotel restaurant, Mr. Robb waxes poetic about worms in his garden’s soil. He describes with passion his dinner the previous Sunday, when he steamed kale and chard and baked different varieties of potatoes filled with fresh chopped tomatoes, chives and mushrooms - all from his garden. “It’s therapeutic,” he says. “It’s spiritual.” And later: “Look in my eyes. This is why I do this work - I really believe in what we’re doing.”

It’s not the typical talk of an executive of his stature. But his soft-spoken manner belies a strong appetite for risk, which has played a big part in the organic grocer’s gains. On this day, the mostly vegan eater is taking a different kind of risk, counting on the restaurant at least having soya milk for his coffee, although he’d prefer almond milk.

Mr. Robb’s entrepreneurial and plodding nature has played a key role in making the high-end Whole Foods an unlikely winner in today’s grocery wars, even as mainstream supermarkets struggle to make gains in a shaky economy. This week, with 316 stores in Britain and North America, the company reported an 8.7-per-cent lift in same-store sales in the fourth quarter. In contrast, those sales at Loblaw Cos. Ltd., Canada’s largest grocer, slipped 0.4 per cent in its last reported quarter.

As it turns out, one of Mr. Robb’s biggest bets came about a decade ago when he convinced his fellow executives at Whole Foods to expand into Canada.

The company was looking to branch out beyond the U.S., and Mr. Robb saw a fit in an unlikely Toronto location. Almost everyone warned him the fashion mall in the swanky Yorkville district was a dud: With an 80-per-cent vacancy rate at the time, it offered a lowly basement location

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for the organic food store at a moderate but not bargain-basement rent. He saw in it a site where a growing number of well-off condo dwellers and nearby office workers could snap up quality fare.

It took a few years to take off as shoppers slowly became familiar with the U.S. banner. Now, to keep up with burgeoning demand here, Whole Foods just expanded its Hazelton Lanes store by 25 per cent. Six other locations have been added in Canada, with three more leases already signed. Its ambitious goals call for a fivefold increase to 35 outlets here and $1-billion of annual sales within seven years.

Rolling out the first Whole Foods store in Canada in the ailing Hazelton Lanes sparked “vigorous arguments” within Whole Foods.

“Looking back on it, we were pretty naive about Canada,” Mr. Robb says, sipping an orange juice. “We didn’t really know what we were doing.”

Co-founded 31 years ago by crunchy-granola type Mr. Mackey, the other CEO who extols a brand of compassionate capitalism, Whole Foods suffered in the recession but is now outpacing conventional rivals. It helps that Whole Foods’ wealthy consumer is spending more freely and its aging, health-sensitive customer is also ready to shell out about 10 to 15 per cent more at Whole Foods for good-for-you products.

Having dual chief executive officers is unusual, and can sometimes be confusing. BlackBerry maker Research In Motion is a prime example of how questions about leadership can unsettle investors and compound other problems.

But while there are similarities between how the co-CEOs of RIM and Whole Foods split their jobs - Mr. Mackey is the more outspoken, familiar face to the public, and Mr. Robb is the details guy who deals with Wall Street and internally pushes the company to expand faster - Whole Foods’ leadership structure hasn’t shown any cracks.

“John’s the one people know,” Mr. Robb says. “I’m the one they don’t know. That’s okay.”

Their marketing strategy, which focuses on the health qualities of its products, is a different story. Just this summer, an upset Whole

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Foods employee at the Yorkville store penned a scathing resignation letter, describing the chain as a “faux hippy Wal-Mart.” He questioned Whole Food’s granola-munching “core values” and accused the chain of enviro-offences, including tossing mountains of food and failing to recycle properly.

“His assessment of the facts are palpably false,” Mr. Robb says after he orders steel-cut oats and fresh berries because “oatmeal is always a safe bet.” He points to his chain’s donations to food banks; at least 5 per cent of annual pretax profit goes to charity.

Mr. Mackey is the one who has raised eyebrows numerous times, even prompting the SEC inquiry several years ago about him using an alias in postings on Yahoo Finance in which he attacked competitors and praised his company’s financial performance. The SEC gave him a pass, but he ruffled feathers again in 2009 when he wrote in The Wall Street Journal that government had no business providing health care, touching off boycotts of the natural grocer.

Mr. Robb says he doesn’t think his co-CEO will go out on a limb again. He sums up their different profiles: “He’s not vanilla, but who wants vanilla every time? You want all the flavours. That’s what you get with John.”

In Mr. Robb, Whole Foods gets more vanilla. But the hippie spirit still lives in him. Even his three grownup children, who once resisted his organic ways, have become believers, he says.

He’s a believer in his company’s prospects in Canada, although he’s learned from bumps along the road. They range from mundane matters, such as having to use the Canadian spelling for words such as flavour, to bigger issues, including border delays and roughly 50-per-cent higher distribution costs because of the relatively small natural foods supply segment in Canada. Real estate is another tricky issue. It takes three to five years in Canada to develop real estate for a store, about twice as long as in the U.S. Canadians are more conservative and have stricter lending guidelines, he said.

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In a major attempt to shave supply-chain costs, he “encouraged” his big U.S. distributor, United Natural Foods Inc., to snap up distribution assets of its Canadian counterpart, SunOpta, last year to gain savings. He also minimizes expenses by running the operation here out of Whole Foods’ Chicago and Seattle offices.

At our breakfast, he demonstrates his patience in tending to the decade-old, slow-budding business in Canada, answering questions well after he’s finished his meal. “We are ready to start our second 10 years and go a little faster.”

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C U R R I C U L U M V I TA E

ROOTS

• Born Nov. 15, 1953, in Boston, where he was raised.• Considers himself “bi-coastal” (his parents divorced and his

father stayed in Boston and mother moved to California.)• Graduated in 1976 with a Bachelor of Arts in history from

Stanford University.

BEGINNINGS

• After Stanford, taught high school in Atlanta with wife.• Returned to California to work in her family’s almond orchard

before opening a health-food store. • Divorced and moved to San Francisco with kids, managing a

small natural foods chain.

CAREER

• Was putting together a natural food store in Mill Valley, Calif., in 1991 when Whole Foods co-founder John Mackey convinced him to swap the lease for equity in Whole Foods.

• Quickly moved up the corporate ranks; became president of the Northern Pacific region in 1993; executive vice-president of operations in 2000; COO in 2001; co-president in 2004; co-CEO in 2010.

• Has an office in Emeryville, Calif., near his home and another at headquarters in Austin, Tex., where he has a condo. On the road 185 days of the year.

PERSONAL

• Single, with three grown children, who once resisted his organic ways but now have become believers. “I like basic, natural simple foods,” he says. “Brown rice, vegetables. Lentils are my favourite.”

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GORD NIXON

REVENGE OF THE BANKER

Royal Bank of Canada chief Gordon Nixon took a lot of heat a few years back when other banks were growing by leaps

and bounds. But he resisted the temptation to bulk up assets at the expense of sound investing, and after other major

players crashed and burned in the financial crisis, RBC is sitting pretty near the top of the heap

ERIC REGULYSaturday, Nov. 27, 2010

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London — Nattily dressed, minus a tie, Gord Nixon saunters into the Blue Bar at The Berkeley Hotel in Knightsbridge, orders a Hendrick’s gin and tonic, reaches into his breast pocket and presents me with a folded piece of paper. I think I know what’s coming and my heart sinks.

It is a photocopy of a column I wrote in May, 2007, when Fred Goodwin, then boss of Royal Bank of Scotland, was on top of the banking heap, buying everything in sight and putting Edinburgh on the global financial services map. The headline, “Bold RBS puts our banks to shame,” suggested that another blue-blooded bank - Royal Bank of Canada - could leap into the international big leagues too if only one Gordon M. Nixon had Mr. Goodwin’s famous bravura.

Today, RBS, minus Mr. Goodwin, is 84-per-cent owned by Her Majesty’s Treasury after reporting a stunning £24.1-billion loss in the 2008 crisis year. The market value of what was once the world’s fifth-biggest bank is now the equivalent of about $38-billion (Canadian). And RBC? It’s worth $77-billion, putting it among the planet’s top 15. What’s more, it has become Canada’s corporate ambassador to the world, the textbook example of a bank that used classic Canadian caution, backed by sound regulation, to survive and thrive while many others around it toppled like dominoes.

Mr. Nixon, who became chief executive officer of RBC in 2001, chuckles and tells me not to feel bad about the article; pre-crunch, all sorts of misguided reporters and analysts were telling him to go big or go home. Some members of his own executive team heaped pressure on him to do the same.

To his credit, he resisted. Indeed, RBC’s rise can’t be down to sheer dumb luck. It was due ultimately to Mr. Nixon’s strength of personality and belief that banks shouldn’t take the easy route to growth. “A lot of CEOs who fell by the wayside lost sight of the fact that they were supposed to be growing franchises,” he says. “Instead, they were growing assets. The easiest thing to grow is a bank’s assets. We could double our balance sheet tomorrow if we went out and made a lot of loans, bought securities and businesses that don’t have good returns.”

That’s what Mr. Goodwin did and that’s why Sir Fred - he was knighted in 2004 - is now often referred to as a “villain” or the “world’s worst banker.”

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Gin and tonics downed, we repair to Koffmann’s at The Berkeley, next door for dinner. It is chef Pierre Koffmann’s comeback restaurant after a decade-long absence. Koffmann’s specialty is hearty Gascon fare, supported by fine French wines, a combination that has made it the newest darling of London’s fine-cuisine scene.

Mr. Nixon orders fish soup and Dover sole on the bone. I opt for the black pudding and mackerel. In spite of his laidback, boyish air, Mr. Nixon knows a thing or two about wine and is especially fond of Italian whites from Piedmont. But this is a French restaurant and Mr. Koffmann doesn’t put Italians on the menu. Mr. Nixon picks a Domaine Alain Chavy premier cru, 2006, from the Puligny-Montrachet vineyards. I wouldn’t know until the bill arrived that it cost almost as much as my flight to London from Rome.

When he realizes that my fish comes with a cup of gorgeously plump French fries, and his doesn’t, he orders his own. “I’m a French fry fiend,” he explains. When they arrive, he goes into rapture: “That’s perfect; much better than bread.”

Mr. Nixon is in a good mood, in spite of complaining about having overindulged the previous evening. He is in town to attend the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award ceremony at Buckingham Palace - RBC is a sponsor of the award - see his daughter Jackie, who works as a Goldman Sachs investment banker in London, and visit RBC’s ever-expanding London capital markets and wealth-management operations. They were recently bolstered by the £963-million purchase of BlueBay Asset Management, a British bond trader.

Less than two months short of his 54th birthday, he is a different sort of executive than he was a decade ago, when he went from relationship manager at RBC’s investment arm to the CEO’s suite at Canada’s top bank virtually overnight. “I would say they were all surprised when I came in,” he says.

The new boy might have exuded confidence, but it was something of a show because he had a big hole in his knowledge: As a career investment banker, he knew almost nothing about RBC’s retail business, which was not without its problems at the time. “The business I was least comfortable with was [retail] banking, which was our biggest business,” he says. “It probably took a few years to get comfortable with decision making around the retail bank.”

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That was one problem; another was being surrounded by Type A executives, some of whom had different views on how the bank should be run and many of whom didn’t get along with each other. “There was a lack of functionality across my executives in the early years,” he says. “It wasn’t a team. You had very different views, very different perspectives, and a lot of turf wars between various members of the executive committee.”

Two of the executives, chief financial officer Peter Currie and banking chief Jim Rager, wanted RBC to make a big splash in the United States, where RBC’s capital markets and banking assets, such as Centura, were too small, too scattered and struggling to make a buck. Mr. Nixon kept fighting them, not, he says, because he was a quivering M&A coward, but because he never liked the American banking model.

“It was a very low-return business and extremely competitive,” he says. “They all compete for retail deposits and they have to deploy these deposits, which means plowing money into the real estate market, which allowed them to grow. How do you justify paying three times book for a bank with a 9-per-cent return on equity?” (RBC’s overall returns on equity typically range from the high teens to the low 20s).

Mr. Nixon won the internal battle. RBC did not go big in the United States (though it was an open secret that it looked at Bear Stearns and Lehman Bros., among others).

Mr. Currie and Mr. Rager hit the road in 2004 and chief risk officer Suzanne Labarge, who had sided with Mr. Nixon on his anti-M&A strategy, retired. In came a new senior executive team. It wasn’t until that point that Mr. Nixon was in full control of RBC. At least, that was the view of the analysts.

“It seemed from the outside, that after 2004, Gord really began to put his stamp on the company and ushered in an era of significant operating improvements across the entire bank,” says Rob Wessel, the former banking analyst turned managing partner of Toronto’s Hamilton Capital Partners. “Gord’s management changes laid the groundwork for the great performance that followed.”

The next four years were uneventful, in the sense that rising markets lifted all banks and hid a lot of mistakes. “Those were enjoyable years,” Mr. Nixon says. “All businesses were growing and gaining market share; all were doing well.”

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Still, he resisted making a big U.S. acquisition, opting instead to pump capital into investment banking, insurance, wealth management and other businesses with the aim of creating a stable, diversified bank with relatively low earnings volatility. “The best decision he ever made was not making a big U.S. retail acquisition in 2006 or 2007; he would have bought at the top of the market,” Mr. Wessel says.

In spite of RBC’s caution, the stupidly inflated U.S. real estate market did bite RBC in the butt. RBC Dominion Securities took $4-billion in financial crisis-related writedowns. That wasn’t huge, compared with the damage suffered by other banks, but it wasn’t fun. Neither was going through the post-Lehman banking crisis. Mr. Nixon says there were moments when he thought RBC might collapse, not because RBC had hidden time bombs primed to explode at any moment, but because the global banking system was at risk. “There’s no such thing in financial services as the last man standing,” he says. “If the system falls apart, everyone goes down with it.”

Two years after the banking crunch, RBC and Mr. Nixon are on top of the world. Even in the meltdown year, RBC was hugely profitable - its profit was $3.86-billion in the year to the end of October, 2009. Which begs the question: Why not quit at the top?

The rumour indeed is that he will hit the links full-time when he turns 55 (Nixon loves golf and plays well, though a friend describes him as “hypercompetitive”). His answers to the retirement question are tantalizingly vague and he gives no clue about the identity of his preferred successor. “I’m only 53. I’d be very surprised if I made it to 60, but I have no intention of leaving in the near term, so it’s somewhere between now and 60,” he says.

He insists there’s a lot left to do before he’s truly happy with the bank, which was actually the worst performer of the Big Five Canadian banks in the last year. RBC’s international bank - the U.S. and Caribbean operations, plus RBC Dexia - needs fixing. That division has lost money in the past two years, though Mr. Nixon expects vast improvements under Jim Westlake, the head of international banking and insurance.

Investment banking, wealth management and insurance will be pumped up and made more efficient. Each of the bank’s main businesses is capable of far greater profitability, he says.

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I suggest that sticking around to squeeze another 10 or 20 per cent or so from an unbroken bank seems rather unambitious. What about something big and bold, something that would define his management of the company?

Forget it, he says. “I’m very happy to stick around and build our businesses. When a CEO starts talking about his legacy, it’s time to short the stock.”

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C U R R I C U L U M V I TA E

BEGINNINGS

• Born in 1957 in Montreal• Educated at Queen’s University, graduating with an honours

degree in commerce

HOME LIFE

• Lives in Toronto and has holiday homes in Muskoka and Florida• Married to Janet. Three children, each of them outside Canada

for work or schooling (London, Paris and North Carolina)

SPORTS AND OTHER PASSIONS

• Golf, tennis, sailing Olympic-class Lasers, Pilates and the odd game of hockey

• Drives a Mercedes S500• Likes white wine from Italy’s Piedmont region

CAREER

• Made more money in 2001, when he spent almost half the year at RBC Dominion Securities, than he did last year

• Began career in 1979 at Dominion Securities in Toronto• Became CEO of RBC Dominion Securities in 1999• Appointed president of RBC in 2001

OTHER INTERESTS

• Chairman of MaRS, a not-for-profit organization that connects science, business and capital

• Co-chair, Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council• Chairman of the Queen’s University Capital Campaign• Appointed a member of the Order of Canada this year

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I N H I S O W N W O R D S

On the future of banking

“I don’t think banks any longer will be measured by size. It’s not a game to show that you’re bigger than the next guy. I think the world has changed dramatically, which is why you’re seeing very little in terms of M&A activity in financial services. If you can’t deploy capital in a way that gives you a good return, you shouldn’t be doing it.”

On the 2008 financial crisis

“We didn’t have [a backup plan]. There was nothing you could do. You were basically ensuring the bank had liquidity in the event there was a complete collapse of the global financial system, which almost happened in Europe, where the interbank lending system disappeared.”

On Lehman Brothers’ collapse

“Letting it go was way more damaging to the system. I think it could have been managed down.”

On reporters’ tape recorders

“I’m more honest when they’re off. That way I can deny it.”

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C O N T R I B U T O R S

Gordon Pitts is the Report on Business Senior Writer on Strategy, Entrepreneurship and Leadership

Susan Krashinsky is the Advertising and Marketing Reporter for The Globe and Mail

Simon Houpt is The Globe and Mail’s Senior Media Writer

Andy Hoffman is the Asia-Pacific Reporter for The Globe and Mail

Richard Blackwell is a Globe and Mail Business Reporter

Jacquie McNish is The Globe and Mail Senior Writer

Joanna Slater is the New York Bureau Chief for The Globe & Mail

Eric Reguly is the European Business Correspondent for The Globe and Mail

Tavia Grant covers Economics for The Globe and Mail

Marina Strauss is the Retailing Reporter with The Globe and Mail’s Report on Business

Brent Jang is the Airlines Reporter at The Globe and Mail

Steve Ladurantaye is The Globe and Mail’s Media Reporter.

Derek Decloet is the Business Writer and Editor at The Globe and Mail

Tara Perkins is the Financial Services Reporter at the Globe and Mail

Nathan Vanderklippe is a Reporter at The Globe and Mail.