Journalism

I have selected here a few of the articles I have had published – most of them in The Financial Post and the rest in The Financial Post Magazine, Canadian Business, The Globe & Mail, Cool Companies, Le Devoir and Small Business Magazine. These articles, organized by topic, had a significant impact at the time or they resonate still.

International

I wrote six “country reports” which each entailed three-week visits to the country, where I had interviews with up to 50 people in business, government, politics, labour unions and the education system. They include:

I will add New Zealand (1983) when it is transcribed.

Other articles on international issues include:

 

Politics & economic development

European elections are routinely fought on the basis of manifestos that are carefully crafted to elucidate their commitment to what they would do in government. In North America, this approach was shunned by politicians who preferred to keep their intentions quiet. I played the parties against each other to squeeze out the Canadian economic manifestos in the 1972 election  – the first time it had been done in Canada. The idea of manifestos subsequently struggled to stay alive for a couple of decades until the Liberal had to repudiate several key policy planks in its “Red Book” after it won the 1994 election. Today, the promises get bigger every year but no written manifestos have appeared since then.

In the 1970s, governments everywhere stepped up their investment in private industry, spending countless millions of dollars to provide the financial resources to selected putative winners who they hoped would bring jobs to their jurisdictions. The practice continues to this day but it rarely works well. I explored the phenomenon in the early 1970s in Government strategies to attract jobs in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, focusing on two particular companies – Saunders Aircraft and Flyer Bus. They do it differently in France: Regional development in France .

In the campaign for the leadership of Canada’s Progressive Conservative Party in 1976, the two (out of 13) candidates who wound up on the final ballot were both long shots when the race began. I profiled them both for the Financial Post . Joe Clark  won in 1976 and was replaced by Brian Mulroney in 1983.

Un rapport sur l’Ontario pour les lecteurs du Québec:  Stratégie économique de l’Ontario

Corporate governance

The dominance of big business by the 1960s created the first stirrings of a campaign to impose Corporate social responsibility on big business. This was my take in 1973.

In the European Community (as it then was), the European Commission moved mountains to align corporate legislation in the member states through a process called Corporate harmonization in the EC 1976. A major part of this program was the push to give unions a significant role in corporate governance: Putting workers on EC boards of directors ;

Business

Much of my business coverage was humdrum, but three stand out:

 

Management

After initiating the Management Page in The Post, I wrote numerous articles on the subject. These four won second place in the Kenneth R. Wilson Awards for Best Series on Professional Development in 1974:

Later, in the Globe & Mail: Employee-care

Labour

The 1970s saw an explosion in strife between employers and their unions. I covered the main issues at stake in the articles below (the first one won the 1973 Kenneth R. Wilson Award for the Best short article and the following four won second place in the 1974 Royal Bank Award for the series on labor:

The most extreme example of poor labor relations occurred in Quebec where construction unions rioted on the site where the James Bay hydro-electric plant was being built. The government appointed Robert Cliche to head a commission to investigate the situation and the Cliche Commission Report did not disappoint when it delivered a devastating overview of the corruption in the province’s union movement. This article won honorable mention in the 1975 Kenneth R. Wilson Awards for best short article.

The growth of union power peaked in 1976 with Labor’s pitch for political power (an initiative by the Canadian Labor Congress for a role in economic decision-making on a par with business and government. It never flew and the long process of decline into relative irrelevance started not too long afterwards.

 

Entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship

In my time at The Financial Post, I wrote several articles on ventuire capital, focussing particularly on the relationship with entrepreneurs (usually bad). Here are three of them, the first of which won the Best Investigative Article in the 1973 Royal Bank Awards.

As Editor of Small Business Magazine, I did not write many articles, but here are two that stood out for me:

When I contributed to the Globe & Mail for a while, I wrote a few profiles and several articles on the skills required to run a successful small business:

Finally, I adapted, for Claudia Sammer’s Cool Companies, the research I did for the Ontario government on the Stages of Growth of small and medium-sized businesses:

Innovation

In my association with Claudia Sammer’s Cool Companies out of Alberta, I delved into the enormous push for innovation in the province:

I also spent some time exploring how Canada and France encourage the commercialization of research in university labs:

 

Editorials

During four years as the Founding Editor of Small Business Magazine (later Profit), I wrote an editorial every issue. As a representative sample, here are my last dozen: