BMO trashes neighbourhoods, police, self

Bank of Montreal posts guards at the entrance to its branches on a two-week rotation. From Vancouver’s Chinatown to Toronto’s Lakeshore, the appearance of a uniformed guard on the sidewalk beside the front door sends a signal that

> the neighbourhood is unsafe
> the police are unable to serve or protect, and
> the place where its customers bank is not secure.   

When I asked the tellers why, I was cheerily told “To make you feel safe.” I told them it did not, that it made me feel angry at the Bank.   

When I asked an assistant manager why, I was told there’d been an alarm on the weekend that there had been movement on the bank roof. On the weekend, the bank was closed. A robber coming through the roof would not attempt such a gambit during daylight business hours, which is when the BMO rent-a-cop stands by the front door.   

When I asked the guard herself why she was there, she replied “I don’t know.” When I asked her what instructions had been given, she answered “Just to watch out for suspicious people.”   

A few moments later, a man carrying four rolled-up carpets walked past her, unchallenged, into the branch. A rolled up carpet is a clever way to carry a shotgun, as part of an organized hoist, while looking like a tradesman replacing the soiled runners with cleaned ones.   

I asked the carpet man, since he evidently had a service contract for many BMO branches, why he thought there was a guard outside.   

“It’s the neighbourhood,” he replied. “It’s rough here.”   

“Why do you say that?” I challenged. “I’ve lived here thirty years. There’s been no bank robbery. There’ve been no store robberies. This community has the lowest crime rate in the entire metropolitan area.”   

“I didn’t know that,” the clean carpet man replied. “I just figured it was a bad neighbourhood because of the guard.”   

So I’ve asked the Bank of Montreal to explain in writing why it pays for ineffective private security officers who stand around like extras on a film set, conveying the impression its branches are unsafe, the neighbourhood is crime-riddled, and the  police force of our city can’t be relied on to respond to the silent alarms any of its branches can use to call the professional security force should the need arise. 

John A. MacNaughton set the standard of integrity and patriotism

Today’s funeral service in Toronto for John A. MacNaughton marks the end of a life that greatly enriched Canada and deeply inspired many people.

John rose above the moil to see the greater possibilities. Whenever he spoke in public, his audience enjoyed his humour, learned something new, and felt uplifted. Whenever John acted in private, others were supported, special needs were addressed, and his example of selfless love gave strength. For whatever task fell to him, John MacNaughton prepared thoroughly, thought deeply, then advanced resolutely.

John was born in the small Ontario town of Exeter on March 6, 1945, two days after I’d been born in the small Ontario town of Bracebridge. In the mid-1950s, our fathers were both elected to the Ontario legislature. By the time John and I met, we were both living on the same street in Toronto, and each of us was working in First Canadian Place. We shared an optimistic view of Canada, knew that our country would be what we as citizens sought to make it, and worked as hard as we could in the public life’s many roles.

John caught the spirit of Canada in our country’s jubilant centennial year, working as a host at the Ontario Pavillion in Montreal at Expo ’67. He went on to work three decades in the investment world, rising to be president and chief executive officer of Burns Fry from 1989 to 1994, then its successor firm, Nesbitt Burns until 1999. He then became founding president and CEO of the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, pioneering a new standard of principles for board governance, and continued this leadership until 2005. Then he served as chairman of the Business Development Bank of Canada. He also chaired the Investment Dealers Association of Canada.

Community service for John extended to many other areas, too. His roles included chairmanship of the Princess Margaret Hospital Foundation; vice-chairman of the University Health Network; chairman of the Canadian Institute of International Affairs; vice-chairman of the Canadian International Council; member of the Prime Minister’s Advisory Committee on the Public Service; and president of The Empire Club of Canada, our country’s longest-running speakers’ forum.

Once earned, John’s support was constant, his advice wise.

The outlook we shared could be called “optimistic realism.”

After living for 41 years with courage and grace in the shadow of cancer, John’s life is ended, but his good works and wise ways ripple out endlessly through his cherished family, his vast circle of friends and colleagues, and his beloved country Canada. To be a friend of John’s was a unique joy. For the rest of my own days, I shall remain inspired by John’s clear thinking and courageous living.

That inspiration is felt by many for whom John MacNaughton set the standard of integrity and patriotism.

From Vancouver, Gary Brookes writes: “For any of us who worked with him under his leadership at Burns Fry and later Nesbitt Burns, it was a dynamic and exciting time. I was grateful knowing that the advice he gave came with his sense of integrity and committment to both firm and community. John truly embodied the spirit of being a great Canadian.”

Cross-Border Migration

The current effort in the United States to contend with cross-border migration from Mexico (and the estimated eleven million illegal immigrants now stateside) is a fascinating counterpoint to the flow of people, especially of French-Canadians, who earlier entered the U.S. from the north.

President Obama this week referred to the need to clarify the status “of those who harvest our crops, cook our meals, mind our children, and clean our houses” – describing the tasks Mexican “aliens” perform because native-born Americans won’t. I have toured Nogales and similar border areas, and spent time at the early morning roadside clusters of workers waiting, and hoping, to be hired for a day’s work.

But a century ago, many from Quebec went south seeking work in mills and forestry, on farms and in shops, for low wages. I have a friend whose mother was a Cree Indian and father a French-Canadian gone to the U.S. looking for work; they met in a roadside diner in New Jersey, where she was a waitress working for tips and he was spending his last dollar for a meal. My friend, their daughter, arrived in due course at a senior level with the CIA.

Important figures in the American literary landscape likewise have such French-Canadian roots. Jack Kerouac, author of the landmark book On the Road, is one. Another is celebrated author Annie Proulx who, in her recent book Bird Cloud, writes movingly about her French-Canadian ancestry and how she felt instinctively at home in Montreal, even though she’d grown up in the U.S.

A century from now, when Spanish is the dominant language in the U.S., today’s nannies and cooks, farm workers and cleaners, questing desperately for a better life in a country known to celebrate freedom and provide opportuntiy for those wanting to get ahead, will be appreciated in a different light.

Trains and Ontario’s Government — GO and Ontario Northland

NDP leader Andrea Horwath calls on the McGuinty Liberal Government in Ontario to scrap its plans to sell off the Ontario Northland Railway as one of the conditions for her party’s support of Finance Minister Dwight Duncan’s 2012 budget. Good.

The announcement that Ontario Northland is to be sold off has been confusing. Employees of the ONR are in the dark as much as the general public. No date was given for when rail service will end; some statements refer to “privatization” suggesting someone other than the government might buy the assets and operate the system, yet elsewhere it is stated the passenger rail service from Toronto to Cochrane is simply being terminated. Not good.

So what’s the situation? Checking into the plans with Elise Bélanger, we found the Polar Bear Express passenger rail service from Cochrane to Moosonee will continue to operate. This is essential for the communities along the line, including a number of flagstops, that depend on the train as the only means of transport.

From Cochrane south, passenger train service is to be replaced by bus service. The government might have more intelligently announced that the transition it had already been making, with a combination of trains and buses, would now be carried to the next step. People would have grasped the picture better. Already ONR operates a busy schedule of buses daily between the north and Toronto, and has reduced train service to one a day. In other words, it set up the passenger train operation to fail.

The ONR is not the only combo of trains and buses operated by the provincial government. The GO Train (“GO” cleverly standing for both Government of Ontario and movement) started as a commuter rail service, and later had buses added. The rail line now connects north from Toronto to Barrie, east to Oshawa and west to Burlington, with buses filling in various routes to make an integrated system.

The Ontario government thus has two rail/bus systems operating in the province, GO transit and the Ontario Northland. The efficiency of the former needs to be extended to the latter, rather than letting the ONR continue to decline due to weak resolve to make it a success. Otherwise, Ontarians will rightly see this as yet another example of northerners getting the short end of the stick.

One example of how the ONR has been set up to fail is the minimal level of train service. When the opportunity to travel on the train is so limited, people will indeed look to other options.

Another example is the failure to invest in trains (buying used and ill-suited equipment from other countries, taking the discards from GO Train service in the south) and for a number of years not maintaining the tracks so that trains were slowed, arriving hours late.

Still another example is the way the Northlander trains and buses interconnect. A passenger can use their ticket on either one, since train and bus tickets are interchangeable — for example, from Toronto to Huntsville. But buses do not use the train stations along the ONR’s route; they go to the same terminals used by other bus lines. Again to use the Huntsville example, there is no waiting room, and no one on duty except in daytime.

It is good that Ontario’s NDP are pushing to keep the ONR rail service operating — but it will need to be upgraded in the same way the GO Transit system is continually enhanced. It will need to be reorganized with a stronger emphasis on the needs of the travelling public. And it would seem the time has come for the Ontario Government to put its two rail operations under a single organziation, with GO and Ontario Northland as part of a cohesive, integrated provincial transportation program.

Fitting Words

William Shakespeare’s reminded us to “Fit the action to the word, the word to the action.”

After the municipal election in Toronto, the Equal Voice organization dispatched an email headlined “Women Break Critical Mass in Toronto Election” and told of a high number of women elected to council. It’s a triumphant stage in local government, to be sure. But “breaking” critical mass? This term, from physics, has meaning if one “reaches” or “achieves” critical mass, but if it should be broken, well, that’s really a pity.

Billboards around Ontario ask “Do You Know Who Made Your Eggs This Morning?” Accompanying the question is a large photograph, on one billboard of a farmer in eastern Ontario, on another of a farm couple from some other rural part of the province. The egg marketing organization, in trying to promote consumption of eggs, obviously decided to humanize the message.

Yet the thought that this man, kindly and smiling though he is, “made my eggs this morning” not only gives short shrift to the hen who created them, yet another example of an executive taking credit for the unacknowledged industry of his workers, but leaves an incongruous image I’d just as soon not associate with eating food.

Even if your mind does not work so literally as to picture this man emiting an egg from his body in the manner of a productive hen, what about the common usage in English of “making eggs” as meaning cooking them. “I’ll make the eggs while you cook the bacon.” This guy was not at my home making my eggs this morning, or any other morning I can recall, at least recently.

The term also has a figurative meaning, as in ”He laid an egg!” – for when a person tried something that is a failure, which this costly advertising campaign strikes me as being, for no reason other than failing to remember the lesson Shakespeare taught.

However, studying roadside billboards at length (the newest diversion for Torontonians boasting North America’s worst traffic congestion since outranking Los Angeles in this department) does not always mean exposure to inept wordsmithing or inapt imagery. In fact, there are plenty of rewarding examples of the lanuague being used for good communication.

Remember when the boast of restaurateurs was to offer “home-cooked” meals, or food “just like Mom made it”? This week a billboard informed me of a new (to me) line of prepared food under the “Ristorante” brand name, presumably available in grocery stores. In a neat switch, the advertisement proclaimed these foodstuffs desirable “for that restaurant taste!” Good-bye comfort food, hello sophistication.

Isn’t it a treat to see artful use of language? Even in small ways like this Ristorante example, one can appreciate the skill of fitting words to an intended purpose, such as working a switch-up on a prized quality like the virtue and taste of home-cooked meals.

On the other hand, once the critical mass of eggs has been broken and an omlette made, it cannot be undone.

When small is big

You don’t always have to be big to make a large impact. In fact, Huntsville’s “doll lady” achieved international renown precisely because she was not big. In 1902, when 18 years old and fully developed, Cora Shay stood only 32 inches high and weighed just 32 pounds.

          An adult in miniature, Shay was an oddity of nature. She fascinated all who met her – including the King and Queen when she was presented to the regal couple when making a royal tour among their Canadians subjects in 1901.

          A midget enthralls people the same way anything rendered in miniature does – be it an extensive model train display, a ship in a bottle, or the entire Bible printed in a book the size of a postage stamp.  The scale allows us to see the familiar in a totally different way.

          When the tiny perfect rendition of something familiar is another human being, we are even more amazed, as the “doll lady” of Huntsville proved. Cora Shay was a remarkable character whose specialty was captivating those who met and spoke with her. On first appearance, she might have seemed to strangers like a fairy, a creature of make-believe delight which, until that moment of encountering Cora, had only been known to populate childhood fantasy tales.

          She seemed like a toy, or a sculptor’s small-scale rendition of a human being. But people’s expectations were tricked. The wee person functioned normally. She was not a toy. She was not an artifice.

          “She is possessed of all her faculties and is very sprightly in manner,” her hometown newspaper, The Huntsville Forester, enthusiastically reassured readers on September 12, 1902. “She is a most interesting conversationalist, a lover of the beautiful.”

          What went unstated was the further astonishment, “How can this be?” Although midgets and dwarfs have long joined other “freaks of nature” in the tents of travelling circuses, the only thing freakish is the huckster’s promotion and display of humans who depart from the norm, or who suffer a disability or defective formation.

          One thing that was not small was Corita’s earnings. People paid admission to see her, and her tours carried her far and wide, often with brother-in-law Joe Walker of Huntsville accompanying her. By April 3, 1903, the Forester reported, as she was about to head off on another tour through the United States, ”Our little Cora is a grand lady while on her travels. She commands a salary that would make a president of a bank happy.”

          By 1905, again performing in the United States as part of the touring Bostock Show, about the only thing that had grown larger was her name, from Cora to Corita. This upgrade was more alliterative for show biz entertainment: “Step this way, folks, and see with your own eyes the world’s smallest woman—Corita Shay!” Corita also sounding more like a diminutive term of endearment.

HELP!  The above is an early draft of an article about Cora Shay, posted here in the hope anyone with more info about her — the Canadian counterpart to Tom Thumb, famous in the United States circus circuits — will reply and share your leads or stories with me.